Potter Yojimbo
by Sneezy
Summary: Auror Harry Potter has sociopathic tendencies, looks good in leather pants, and can't escape the life he's chosen. Enter Luna Lovegood. Multichapter, HarryLuna.
1. Reverse Superman

**Potter Yojimbo**

I disclaim all ownership of these characters, etc. etc. etc.

This is a post-hogwartian fic that may require creative interpretation of some cannon events. For example, Draco as a leather pant wearing auror is too good a character to pass up, even if it is more fannon than cannon at this point.

* * *

**Chapter One – Reverse Superman**

His armbone shattered with a wet sounding snap, and the auror flew into the ground, screaming in pain.

Just as I'd planned.

"Gosh, terribly sorry old chap!" I cried, flying straight over, holding a thumb up behind my back at George and Fred.

Now don't get me wrong, I really was sorry the poor sod had to get his arm splintered by a bludger, but sadly we didn't have any time to come up with anything... well, less drastic, shall we say.

All of us flew over and landed to help the lad up again. Really though, the way he was carrying on was quite uncalled for. Of course, maybe this was the first time he'd had a bone broken. Of course, first time it happened to me was when I was something like five or six years old, so my heart wasn't doing a whole bunch of bleeding for him.

Eventually we got his snivelling butt inside The Burrow, and I dodged Gin who was doubtless wondering why me and the twins had conspired to break an auror's arm. Then I dodged Molly's lecture about playing too roughly, dodged the guy with the broken arm who wanted to hero worship me a bit, and finally beat a hasty retreat to my flat. With that sort of prowess in evasion, they should have called me the Artful Dodger, not Mad Harry Potter the Madman like some people did. Sadly, those people were mostly my collegues, but there you are. Comes with the territory I guess.

Anway, I figured the poor schmuck would be recovering under Molly's tender care for at least a week, which would give me all the time I needed. That was of course why we'd had to shatter his arm, not just go for a clean break. It wouldn't do at all to have him up and around and able to do his job in a couple days time after a gulp of skelegrow potion.

So I settled down with a small glass of port and went over the files one more time. The small glass was because of constant vigallence, and all that. The files were because after all that time hanging around with Hermione, I had to pick up something. But anyway, everything was coming together quite nicely.

I laughed what was quite a credible evil laugh. I'd been practicing again with Draco.

The game was starting again, and this time I was playing to win. Not just win, but win big.

* * *

The next morning I headed into work, wearing a conservative three piece suit, and looking like a total ministry drone. That is, if you were willing to overlook the bleached hair and ear rings. And the fact that I was the hotness. Whatever. It was all an image thing; necessary, but a royal pain in the arse. 

I am Auror Harry James Potter, slayer of the Dark Lord Voldemort, recipient of the Order of Merlin First Class, and all-round badass.

George and Fred had made an action figure years ago, and it still sold well. Wizarding Britain still needed a big loud Griffindor superhero to buy into, even after all these years.

So I went ahead and did it.

Performed a reverse superman.

I've hidden Clark Kent and I run around like an idiot superhero, day after day, week after week, and year after year.

So as I stride through the hallways of the ministry towards my office with a firm, purposeful, heroic step, I suppose I might as well answer that question you're dying to ask.

"Mr. Potter, why are you so bloody sexy?"

That wasn't it? Sorry. You know things are bad when I'm cheeky even in my inner expository monologues. Next question.

"Why did you have to break another auror's arm yesterday?"

I'll get to that. Things might get clearer as we go.

So I get to my office and toss my jacket up onto a hook. They'd tried to get me to wear a cloak, but I just wasn't up for that. Afterall, I enjoyed wine, and anyone who wears a cloak and sips at red wine from a glass is always a complete and utter basterd who gets fully owned by the hero in the end, and I sure as hell wasn't going down that path.

And anyway, bespoke tailoring is better than fuggly robes anyday of any week.

Compared to the other auror offices, you could tell this one was mine from the movie posters up on the wall. Most wizards weren't that familiar with movies, so the big poster in the frame advertising Akira Kurosawa's Yojimbo didn't mean anything to them at all, other than a wierd drawing that didn't move at all.

Yojimbo, for those who don't know, refers to a bodyguard for hire. Like me. Whoring myself out to the ministry just for the chance to make sure that nobody else has to live the life I have, and maybe save some people in the process.

One time when we were drunk, Ron asked me how they were paying me. The ministry, I mean. He knew it wasn't the money or fame. He kept pushing me, and I ended up standing up in the middle of a wedding reception, drunk off my skull, listing all the people killed by Voldemort and all the other fucking pureblood supremacists who'd come after him. All those dead people had given everything. They'd bought my soul with theirs, from the day of my birth until the day I died fighting for them.

He didn't ask again. I know that Ron, Hermie, Gin, and some of the others didn't really buy into my reasoning, but I refused to argue about it with them.

Come to think of it, that little bit of self pity that just slipped out might have given you an answer to another question. Why did people still need a superhero? Let's just say that some of Voldemort's ideals didn't exactly die with him. They just slipped underground. Death Eaters and their sympathisers went back to their businesses and fortunes and kept quiet. And every once in a while, muggle born wizards and witches would die. Squibs would be hunted down and killed. The punch at a wedding between a pureblood and a mudblood would be spiked with something other than alcohol.

Really, it was a hell of a lot harder than before. Nobody leapt around in funny outfits screaming out "Now's the time to DIE, Potter!!!". Nobody cackled an insane laugh before using the crucio curse on a puppy, or if they did it was in a members only pureblood club, hidden away from view. Or maybe the one using the crucio was an auror who's neice had been at the wedding with the poisoned punch who really wanted some answers to their questions.

Now, like I read in a book somewhere, it was half angels fighting half devils, and I sure as hell didn't know which I was. But it really didn't matter what I was; what mattered was who I was fighting for.

I tossed off a salute to the Yojimbo poster, grabbed my jacket and sword cane, and headed off to the Monday assignments meeting of the central auror bureau.

On my way out of the office, I almost bumped into Draco who was also heading down to the meeting.

"Wotcher, Malfoy," I slurred out, choosing to assume "distainful and sexy pose #3" this morning.

"Potter," he replied, casually violating my personal space and engaging me in a staring contest.

If there'd been any sexual tension at all between us, it would have been blazing like a forest fire.

A female trainee auror passing us turned bright red and almost fainted.

Score.

It was the little games that made life fun. Later we could read what she'd posted on the MagicBoard (tm) fangirl forums and get a good laugh.

We sauntered off to the meeting, and I murmured over to Draco.

"Cover a spell for me when we get in there, huh?"

"Sure mate. What's up?"

"I need a specific assignment, one of the last ones."

"Fill me in later?"

"Cheers."

Slouching at the back of the room in some horribly uncomfortable chairs, Draco pulled an ostentatious cigarette holder out, tapped one in, and lit it with a unnecessarily showy wandless flame conjuration.

This helped to reinforce his already well-cultivated image, but also gave me a chance to toss a quick charm on myself without anyone noticing the comparitively minor magical release.

The last thing I wanted was for any of the higher ups to pay any real attention to me before I needed them to. In theory I was out on vacation.

The head auror arrived a couple minutes later, and we spent the next hour going over assignments for the fifty or so aurors that were in the room.

Eventually it was my turn.

"Final assignment for today: paper editor had yet another death threat. Trainee Johnston, it's yours. Trainee Johnston?"

"Ah, I'll take that one, Sir," I said, dropping the charm and lifting a languid hand. "Little Johnny got his arm smashed playing Quiddich this weekend, so I ended up coming in to cover for him until he's up and around again."

"Merlin, Potter, you're a pain in the arse. Fine, switch him onto it when he can hold a wand. Here's the file."

"Roge-oh, Sir," I said, and slipped out of the room before the ministry aide who was there could do anything about it.

Ten points to Harry bloody Potter.

And yes, that's why Johnny had to get his arm busted up on the weekend.

See, here's the back story. A paper spreads news that they'd be running a big expose on ministry corruption in a week's time. Now to me and the others I run with, its clear that the paper will never get a chance to publish that story, since the corrupt parts of the ministry are, well, corrupt. There's never a lack of bigots, dark lovers, and psychotics who are quite willing to do anything at all for a few galleons. The people in the minstry who won't want this published have plenty of galleons.

So we send a death threat, cripple the useless junior who the ministry would assign to protection duty to make things easy for their killers, and get me into the full time bodyguard gig instead.

This convinces more corrupt officials that there's something serious going on. The week goes on, and the minor thugs they send first to deal with the editor and paper get taken out by me. People who stand to loose more start to panic. They start to ask other people questions about what they should do. Money changes hands. Maybe they get themselves a werewolf or two.

The shit hits the fan.

I stand firm for a week and draw the heat onto me and the editor I'm guarding. Hermie and all the others run around like crazy for a week and spy on absolutely anything that so much as fucking squeeks, gathering evidence.

In the end, the puppet masters get exposed attempting to stop the expose. I get to take out a bunch of low level dark lover trash. Plus then there's the fallout from the expose itself. Situational irony at work.

Harry Potter and company win big.

Call it a double sting operation, or whatever you like, but in the end all that really matters is the last bit, where we win, and they loose.

So I go and draw some equipment from the materials section, including some stuff that I probably shouldn't have. But the equipment officer this morning is female, and although it irratates me, Draco insists on calling my sword cane a 'pimp stick' for a reason. Well, a reason other than the fact that it irritates me.

Not that I actually date anyone. Attachment equals vulnerability and vulnerability equals point of attack, and as the movies show, vulnerability through attachment equals doing a slow motion jump in front of that point of attack meant for your loved one, screaming "NOOOOOOOOOO!".

Anyway, so I 'port home, grab a week's worth of cloths suitable for fighting in, get Dobby to stuff them in a trunk, grab some other equipment which in no way belongs in my hands, and 'port out to the country house I'll probably be spending my week defending. I walk up to it, noting sight lines and ward systems.

I've been here before, even if it was a few years ago, so after I knock on the door, I take a pinch of sparkling dust out of the jar on the doorframe and sprinkle it over my head.

The door opens, and I find myself looking into the distinctive eyes of one of my old friends.

"Hullo, Harry Potter," she says, and gives me a nervous smile that's not quite what I expected from her.

Of course, as you may have guessed, the paper in question is The Quibbler, and the editor is Luna Lovegood.

* * *

**Author's Notes**

Half angels fighting half devils is quoted from John LeCarre's Smiley's People.

Yup yup... so this is something short that turned into something longer. I'll continue as soon as I can, which could be promptish, since I'm trying to avoid death-by-studying at the moment.


	2. Not Quite According to Plan

I'll disclaim everything totally once again, but I probably won't bother again.**  
**

**Chapter 2 - Not Quite According to Plan**

* * *

Luna Lovegood and I stare at each other for a second before I lunge at her to give her a hug, and smack into her because she was doing the same to me. 

My arms wrap around her, and I give her a short hug, guaranteed to cause weakness in female knees, snake my hand up to the back of her neck and cast a wandless tracking charm on her so I know where she is. Only to find her hand at the back of my neck, casting a wandless tracking charm.

I pull away from her and look at her again. She's looking at me with slightly narrowed eyes as well.

Right.

"Oh... ummm... well, maybe you should come in then, Harry," she said, and dragged me by the hand into the entry hall.

Then, as I'm standing in the entrance, starting to look her over a bit, I feel wards slamming into place all around the house.

She still has hold of my other hand, but her eyes are now focussed on the wand I have pointed at the end of her nose.

"Luna, what the fuck is going on?" I ask; sweetly I felt, given the circumstances.

"Now look Harry," she says, uncrossing her eyes, "just come in and sit down, and I'll explain. Nothing to worry about at all, especially since you dusted yourself on the way in."

"Maybe if you tell me what the wards are for, then I'll know there's nothing to worry about, huh?" And maybe I won't have to hex you into tomorrow, I add, not out loud of course. She is an old friend, after all.

"Well alright. I had planned to make polite small talk for at least another ten minutes, but if you insist, I can start the presentation early," she said, and drags me into the living room. She motions to a chair, and stands on the other side of the room beside what looks like a projection screen.

"Look, Luna, if you're going to tell me about the Humdingers, I know, we've started to..."

"Not at all, Harry," she interrupted, "just listen for a minute."

She dims the lights, points to something that looks a bit like a projector, and says "_lumos_". She seems to have created an overhead projector. On the screen are two large pictures of me. One is about ten years old, and the other dates from last year.

"As you can see," she says, extending her wand into a pointer, "through these points of comparison, the two aren't quite the same. For one thing, your hair isn't black anymore, Harry. Also, you aren't as skinny. Finally..." she trails off, peering at some notes she's picked up.

"Well, I don't think I need to cover that bit. What was I thinking when I wrote this?" She drops the notes and moves on to the next slide, which seems to be a picture of the back of a man, and the front of Madame Rosmerta. Both are wearing corsets and stockings.

"Oh."

She changes the slide again, this time to a complicated map of her house with a legend on the side, and colour codes all over it.

"Ahem," she clears her throat.

"Luna?" I interrupt.

"Yes, Harry," she says, turning to look at me and peering into the relative darkness of the room towards me.

"The wards, Luna? What are they for?"

"Well, couldn't you just wait for a bit? You see, the presentation is quite good I think, and covers it quite well."

"Common, what's up," I say, with a bit of a growl in my voice. Sure, I'm getting a bit pissed. She's sometimes a bit off, but this is just plain wierd.

She sighs, turns the lights back on, and sprawls down on the rug in an inelegant heap.

"Well, they're so you can be my boyfriend."

I cough. "What?"

"See, I told you that you should have waited for the presentation. It would have all made sense that way."

"Luna, I don't think that Merlin himself could fucking make sense of that. What are you on about? What the hell do some wards have to do with that?"

"Well Harry, you see they're anti-apparition wards, so that you couldn't run away without at least talking to me first," she explains, looking down at her hands while she plays with her wand.

"You know that the knowledge of how to make permentant anti-apparition wards is a secret, right? That only the ministry Unspeakables know? And that take a year of work to put up around a building?"

"Well, it certainly took me a good six months to figure them out and put some up around the house. It was quite tricky, really."

She looked up at me with a tiny hint of a smile.

I take a breath to really start tearing into her. I mean, killer glare and all. Break her arms with hexes and yell in her face. Side kick to her face and stand over her, wand digging into her eye, screaming at her.

And then I sigh, and let it out.

And I answer her smile with one of my own, because this is Luna. She's a friend.

"Sorry," I say with a sigh. "Maybe the presentation would have been good after all. But give it a shot without the visuals, huh?"

"Well, I have to admit that I wasn't entirely truthful when I published that story about the conspiracy in the Ministry of Magic, Harry. But I felt that you would probably be the one to come and guard me, and I really did want to talk with you."

"Not truthful?" I ask.

"Well of course not. As you know, the Rotfang Conspiracy was thwarted by a crack team of dental surgeons who attacked the Ministry at night in a daring commando raid."

She leans up and whispers to me, "Also, daddy and I were instrumental in distributing muggle flouride toothpaste to some of the vampire population most at risk." She sits back on the floor again.

"So not to worry, Harry."

"You know," I inform her, head in my hands, "that there may actually be more than one conspiracy? That there may actually be quite a few people now who want you dead?"

"I honestly hadn't thought of that, Harry," she says, "but you're joking about that, right?"

"Nope," I mutter, with a sigh.

"Are you sure you aren't joking?" she asks, with a bit of a frown.

"Look, if I was joking, I'd say 'Three men walk into a bar: two of them are priests and the other is a rabbi'..."

She interrupts me with a wave of her hand.

"So what sort of consipracy is it then, Harry," she asks. "Not that old Heliopath thing, certainly, or the Goblin pies." She looks up, and stops tapping her lip with her wand.

"I've heard rumours of black market Milkbone sellers, pushing their evil wares to innocent werewolves, but I didn't think the ministry would get involved with that," she continues, looking more and more perplexed.

"Actually," I say, "it's probably a coalition of pureblood supremacists, ex death eaters, and dark magical creatures who want to kill you and burn your house down to ashes."

Luna Lovegood looks like a deflating balloon.

"Oh, Harry," she mutters, "how dreadfully boring. I thought you were doing exciting things with your life, but that bunch of mouldy old stuffed shirts is the best you can do?"

"Well, they might seem a bit more exciting when twenty of them, along with giants, werewolves, and heavily armed muggles, are doing their level best to make you an ex-Luna."

She considers, tapping her lips with her wand again. Is she doing that intentionally, I wonder, because it's sort of hot.

"Well that might be rather interesting, even if it isn't particularly fun," she finally decides. "Can I help?"

"Sure thing, it's your house, after all. Have you kept up with your duelling?"

"I certainly have," she affirms with a nod. "After all, I need to be good enough so that I don't get in your way if I'm your... well..." she trails off.

An awkward silence descends.

"Well it seemed much easier to discuss that sort of thing when I was practicing the presentation," she says, somewhat awkwardly.

"Look, how about we set up some of the defenses I've brought along, and you can explain the whole boyfriend thing to me while we're doing that. You can pretend I'm not here, or something, if it makes it easier." I figure that a bit of tolerance won't hurt. Afterall, I'll be spending the week here.

Plus, while I've had more than my share of witches asking to let them bear my love child, none of them has been Luna, and none of them have had quite the same approach as her.

"That sounds quite sensible," she says approvingly. "Well, shall we get started then?"

The next hour or so is spent mostly in silence as we erect and activate a terrifying number of semi-legal and plain illegal magical boobytraps all around the Lovegood residence. It isn't until after I've laid the Unwelcome Mat (tm) on the back step and started to enchant some powerful anti-flame wards that she speaks up.

"Well, you see Harry," she says, "things really started when I saw that picture of you about a year and a half ago, in the Daily Prophet. You were at some awards ceremony or another, and you looked simply miserable."

"I thought I was smiling for that one," I say, before engaging is some rather tricky magic to power the wards.

"Harry, if you can't tell the difference between smiling for a camera and being unhappy by now, there's nothing I can do for you at all," she says, sounding slightly disapproving.

"Ok, ok, fine, so I was unhappy," I admit grudgingly.

"I was concerned, Harry, so I did a bit more research and figured out that you were hardly ever happy," she says, poking her head into the living room so she can see me. She gives her head an unhappy shake.

"Of course then I tried to share my concerns with Ginny, Ron, and Hermoine," she continues, flapping around randomly with two lemons tied to the end of a stick, thumping them on the walls.

"Ron didn't really want to talk to me much and certainly wasn't very open minded, and I had no idea that Ginny was still that annoyed with you at that point, and Hermione at least took the time to look over my research, but decided that I didn't have enough evidence to back up my claims. But then I realised that I'd been going about things entirely the wrong way, and I was, in fact, being part of the problem. I very much regretted that when I realised it," she continues, with a sigh.

"Problem?" I grunt, weaving more and more complex chains of magic.

"Well yes," she says, stepping into the room with me, "I went and talked to other people first, instead of just coming to see you. I treated you like a celebrity, not like a friend who I could just go and have a nice chat with. At least, I assumed that you were still my friend?"

"Sure thing," I reply in a tight voice.

"Oh good! That does make things rather easier," she says with a happy smile that almost distracts me from what I'm doing. I think it might be the first really honest smile I've got out of her since I arrived here.

"So, since we're friends and all, I decided to sit down with you and talk for a while, and see what was wrong," she says, as I finish casting the wards and slump down on the arm of a chair to catch my breath.

"You were rather hard to get in touch with though. All my mail to you kept on coming back undelivered. It was rather disheartening at first," she mentions, with a tiny shrug, as she sits down on the end of the couch near me. "But then things kept on coming back, so I chose to believe that it was simply automatic blocking, not a deliberate desire to not talk with me."

Now, since I'd got in touch with my amoral and dangerously sexy badass side, I'd rarely had occasion for feelings of real guilt. It goes with the whole amoral gig. But I was feeling it now since it was really my fault that I hadn't added Luna to my permitted owls list. I hadn't thought of her. And that sucked.

"I'm sorry, Luna," I said, looking over at her. "I'll make the changes to my owl list right now," and with a mutter and a wave of my wand, I did.

"Don't feel too bad, Harry," she says, "and it's very nice that you made the change straight away. You haven't even heard the end of my explanation yet. So anyway, I decided that I was going to have to be a bit more proactive when it came to talking with you."

"So you wrote the newspaper story?"

"Actually, my first impulse was to hunt you down and talk with you. I mean, I didn't have any trouble finding the minature invisible giant space hamsters, so you weren't going to be much of a challenge. But while I was planning out the hunt, I realised something."

"Mmmm?" I hummed, looking inquisitive. I was relaxing a bit, and starting to feel in control again.

"Well, that I was being egotistical. You do have plenty of other friends to talk to, and assuming that I would be able to give you something none of them could and cheer you up would be quite..." she pauses and considers her words, "rude of me."

"So I altered my plans. Since none of your existing friends were your girlfriend, or boyfriend, I thought that perhaps by taking on that sort of role, I would be able to contribute something additional to your life, and maybe cheer you up. Of course, the results of subsequent research showed that..."

She rattles on, a real Ravenclaw in her home element, detailing all the research she'd done on me. She gets excited, and gesticulates with her wand, punctuating her points with short jabs, reviewing her presentation from memory.

I notice for the first time that she's probably chosen to wear nicer cloths as well, to meet me in. It isn't couture, and she isn't showing much skin, which instantly sets her apart from most witches who try to get with me. But in a purely objective sense, she isn't bad. Five out of ten in these cloths. Maybe seven out of ten in something that suited her better. She colours a bit across her cheekbones. Looks like she's just become aware on some level that I'm checking her out. She isn't that tall, and she's still skinny, but being loose limbed and gawky makes her seem like she takes up more space than she does. She probably cuts her own hair, and she chews her nails. She's got thin scar on one cheek that didn't used to be there. Ah well.

She's Luna.

"So that's when I decided what my plan would be," she says, luckly just as I start listening to her again.

"Plan?" I ask.

"Well, I was aiming for a week or so here, where the two of us could relax and talk things over a bit, but it seems rather like that's not going to be possible from what you were saying."

"I don't know. We might be able to manage long periods of relaxation interspersed periodically with over the top violence, blood letting, and ass kicking. We'll have to see how it goes."

"Blood letting, Harry?"

"I didn't bring my sword for nothing. Sometimes its useful." I choose to leave the guns in my trunk out of this for the moment.

"Perhaps a drop cloth of some sort is in order then," she says gamely, but I can tell she's feeling a tiny bit shaken by all this.

"It's just the reality of the situation," I tell her, "I'm sorry. There isn't going to be too much room for romance, if that's what you were hoping for."

"I had been thinking that I might be due a little bit by now," she says gravely. "I suppose you aren't really in favour of my plan then. We can just talk once in a while, now that I can mail you."

I shrug.

"We can still give it a try, if you really want." If I was any more casual, I'd have to change into a polo shirt and jeans. It's a bit forced though, because my heart is still hammering in my chest.

She meets my eyes.

"Really? So I'm your girlfriend now?"

"I guess so."

She turns around, and starts to take down the projection screen. It takes her three tries. I suspect I'm not as nervous as she is.

"Right, then," I clear my throat, "as your boyfriend, I suggest that you go and change into something more comfortable that you can fight it."

"A skirt will perhaps make diving and rolling more difficult. I'll go and change then. Make yourself at home in the mean time, Harry."

She runs off upstairs. I didn't know Luna ran anywhere. She still hadn't turned around to look at me.

I sit on the arm of the couch. What the hell have I just got myself into? I'll have to think about it later. First things first. I test the wards again.

I still don't know how she pulled the anti-apparition ward off. It doesn't feel quite right though.

She thunders back downstairs, runs into the room, and throws herself on the couch.

"That's very muggle of you," I manage, looking down at her from my perch on the armrest. Did I say seven out of ten?

"Audrey Hepburn is my hero," she says, beaming a full Luna smile at me, her eyes sparkling. "The internet is just too useful when it comes to looking for news stories for the Quibbler, so I had to get an appartment in London where all the computer stuff would work."

"And you watched movies?"

"Movies, Harry, are exceptionally wonderful things."

And I smile at her, because I happen to agree.

"In addition, I'd like to point out that if I belonged to a pantheistic religion, which I suppose I might, I would worship the gods of the muggle clothing store," she says, still smiling up at me. Looking at her in black capris, bright jeweled Indian slippers, and a chocolate brown men's dress shirt, I can't help agree. All the accessories are pure Luna though.

"That's also the first real smile I've seen from you since you arrived, you know?" she comments. "I'm glad that I'm not completely wasting my time."

"For the chance to actually talk movies with someone... even a week of Snape's potions class would have been worth it. And you're a lot better than Snape's potions class."

"Truth?"

"One hundred percent," I reply with a grin.

There's a pause.

"Now, speaking of truth, Harry, isn't it about time you dropped that glamour?"

Once again, I am confused.

"Ummm, which glamour?"

"Harry!"

"No, really," I say. "I don't have one on me. Go ahead and check."

"You're serious, aren't you," she says, still in a disbelieving tone of voice.

"No, I'm Harry," I reply, "but this is really what I look like."

She opens her mouth, closes it, and shakes her head. Then checks for glamours on me.

Then she pokes the left cheek of my fabulous buttock.

"Flaming Merlin, Harry," she says, "I didn't think that sort of perkiness occured naturally."

I start to laugh.

"Should I be checking you for glamours then?" I ask, and cast an obvious glance at the contents of Luna's black capris.

Seven out of ten was a conservative estimate, it seems, in the way that Maggie Thatcher was a conservative Prime Minister.

Luna colours, giggles, and lurches off the sofa.

"I'll get some tea then, shall I?" she says, almost tripping over the edge of the rug on her way to the kitchen.

It was probably just as much the fact that she'd got me to laugh as it was the flirty comment I'd just made, but I, Harry Potter, had just made Luna Lovegood happy, and a bit giddy.

I'm frankly surprised at how happy that, in turn, has made me. Suddenly, a week with Luna doesn't seem like such a bad deal after all.

Then, in a cosmic attempt to ensure that the general karmic balance of my life stayed somewhere near "The Suck", a pair of Death-Eater wannabes chose that moment to apparate into Luna's living room.

* * *

Well, I have to admit that the 'if I was joking I would say' line comes from Hot Shots Part Deux. 

I hope this continues the tone well from the first part. Also, hopefully I haven't irratated anyone with my take on an older Luna. I may have been inspired in part by WittyLibrarian's Luna from the awkward date series (which is a wicked good read, and is in my favourites somewhere) at least when it comes to movie-going. Harry's preoccupation will be explained soon, but I think it makes sense too.

Also, I'm changing the rating of the story down to 'T', since there's really only a bit of bad language. Anyone disagree with that assessment? I'll bump it back up if anyone thinks it should stay as an 'M'

Maybe more in a week or so, we'll see.


	3. Romance Doesn't Enter Into It

Chapter 3 – Romance Doesn't Enter Into It. Maybe.

* * *

Now before I resolve the cliff-hanger, and deal with the rude bastards who are going to get in the way of my tea, let's take a step back for a minute. Let's consider Luna's anti-apparition wards.

Some of you might be thinking that they didn't work at all. After all, this is Luna, and maybe those wards just stop Grindliebows, or something absurd like that. You'll notice, however, that I made no movement whatsoever to port out through those wards. Her brilliance might operate at a ninety degree angle to reality, but it's still brilliance.

So I was what you might call unsurprised when the two members of the first assault wave (read: most expendable morons) pop into existence spilched into dozens of pieces.

"Prepare to DI... shit, what's happened?" exclaims one of the hapless sods. His masked face contorts in interesting ways, but the hand holding the wand that would make him a threat is balanced on a bookshelf on the other side of the room

Luna pops her head back around the kitchen doorway.

"Bugger," she exclaims happily, "that wasn't quite what I was aiming for."

"Luna," I say, "in these circumstances your wards have a simple and elegant beauty. Now perhaps if you have a basement, we can use it to store these bits."

"Well, as it happens, we do have some rather cool dry rooms in the basement. Two are full of Mommy's things, and Daddy's homebrew wines, but the third is quite available." I observe her eyes lighting up with glee.

"Tell me, Harry, are we to have a dungeon for prisoners to languish in? That would be splendid."

"Well, I hadn't planned on it, since restraining people for lengthy periods is normally more trouble that it's worth, but in the circumstances I'd say let's mobili corpus their bits down there and let them languish away. Perhaps you want to secure the dungeon, and put out a couple doggie bowls of water for them."

"Right Sir," she says with a cheeky salute, "securing our dungeon, sir!"

She exits, and I crouch down next to the nearest head, which has been swearing at me this whole time, in a fairly uncreative fashion.

"Shut up, you shit" I mutter. "Just be glad you're going in the cellar. You know my reputation." I give him a gentle nudge with my foot to reinforce my point. "If you hadn't ported through a cheese grater, I'd have put a reducto through your open mouth before you'd finished threatening me."

The skin visible around his mask went very pale. It's true that he was lying on the floor of Luna's living room in a number of small pieces, but at least he was alive. I hear his mate blubbering quietly over behind the sofa somewhere.

"Accio, wands," I suggest, and grab the two hands and wands as they fly towards me. I collect the two wands, snap them, and then collect together all the different parts of person there are to collect. It wouldn't do to leave an ear sitting where it could hear us planning or anything.

Come to think of it, where does the blood go when someone in lots of bits goes pale with fear? I'll have to ask Hermie. Or maybe Luna. I'm sure her theory would be a lot more fun anyway.

I hear her crashing about in the basement, and some clanking. Knowing her, she's fastening some manacles to the wall to fasten people's hands into, even if their hands aren't currently attached to anything.

Speaking of Luna, I suppose some of you might be wondering what's going on. After all, didn't I just finish saying that I wasn't looking for Romance, and here I was, getting myself a girlfriend?

Despite what Draco would tell you, I'm not going to use her for a week and then toss her aside. Of course, anything he says is a bit suspect since he's blissfully married, the bloody hypocrite.

I've done that in the past with other witches, but it would be harder with Luna. Even if I play the cold, cold "I'm an amoral bastard who was just using you card," she might trump it with her "but we can still be good friends" card or worse her "I'll totally ignore reality and keep treating you the same way" card.

And ok, there was a while back during the Hoggwarts years that I fancied her like mad.

Yeah.

Really.

It was the summer after Sirius died, and thoughts about her were the only thing that gave me any sort of comfort. Little daydreams of me playing the hero for her, protecting her or getting her stuff back for her, filled my hours of work for the Dursleys. Maybe she'd reward me with a hug, or even a quick kiss!

Merlin. It's amazing how quickly you can loose your innocence.

Anyway, nothing ever came of it, but I can still feel it now. There's still a bit of a spark. I felt it when her hand was on the back of my neck, putting a quick little tracking charm on me.

On top of that lingering wistfulness, there's another, part of me that's saying that even if I drop her like a hot pan after this week, it'll make controlling her on this job much easier.

I really am a cold hearted bastard aren't I? Or at least having a good try at it.

Luna marches back in whistling that song about the Duke of York and his 10,000 men.

"Dungeon keeper, reporting for duty, Sir! Two bowls filled with water, and one filled with Daddy's special Jimson Weed wine."

She leans over to me conspiratorially, "If they drink much of that, they'll be hallucinating for days, and we won't have to worry about them at all, as long as we ignore what they say about the bats."

"Right then, fall in boys, and off we go," I say, levitating the pile of body bits down to the cellar, where I stop at the door and look around in wonder.

"Fantastic job you've done on the dungeon, I must say."

I hear a mad cackling laugh and the lash of a whip echoing around the room, adding to the ambiance. A rubber anatomy skeleton hangs from one set of manacles that are set into the damp, moss covered rocks that make up the walls. There is a slow, steady dripping of fetid water.

And to think, a few minutes ago this was probably a nice airy storage room filled with childhood toys.

She blows on the tip of her wand.

"I did get an 'O' in charms, after all," she says to me with a grin.

"Mmm, but let's not loose sight of our priorities, after all," I say.

"Priorities?"

"Yup. I believe you were making tea, and to me that seems like a perfect way to segue neatly into one of the relaxation portions of this week."

"Fabulous," she says, and drifts off upstairs again. I only pause long enough to change all three doggy bowls to this intriguing wine before I follow.

The Geneva convention is one thing, but hearing death eaters gibbering about bats while lying in small pieces on the floor of Luna's admirably campy dungeon is just too high in entertainment value to give up.

Pictures will be taken, and Draco will laugh his ass off.

I wander off for tea, but I perceive that you may have another question, being the terribly curious types that you are. Since I'm an international man of mystery, much like Austin Powers, you naturally have plenty of questions. And that question is doubtless: what's all this about Draco? Wasn't there a time when you hated his guts?

You're right of course. It was hard to get over. Oddly, it all started at the moment of his greatest betrayal. The fact that he just couldn't kill Dumble meant something to me. Ron still dismisses it, and still hates Draco, but Ron's out of it now, and can still live in a world of blacks and white, Griffs and Snakes.

The next time I met up with Draco after that, we were the last ones standing after a fight that had left bodies strewn over the floors around us. I suppose we could have had a John Woo moment, with doves flapping across between us, followed by a duel featuring plenty of gratuitous bullet time effects.

But we didn't. We looked around, lowered our wands, and backed off. It just wasn't worth it. At that point we were both torn up inside; sickened by what was going on around us.

He was lucky in a way. If he'd met up with me a month later, I'd have lost that sense of outrage, and I'd just have killed him. A year later, and the whole room of them would have been dead before they knew what was happening.

But anyway, he switched sides a while later, and did some pretty good stuff for us. Spouting off about mudbloods in school and seeing what the death eaters actually did to them were two very different things.

To cut a long story short, we found ourselves after the war as quite close friends, brought together by living through the sort of horror that muggle wars only hint at. We also found ourselves to be two young, highly decorated, famous, single, filthy rich, aurors.

Let the games begin.

We were so screwed up at that point that it took a while before we got around to caring about anything but ourselves again, and by then our reputations had been made, confirmed, and written about in unauthorised biographies.

Hermie got out of my life until I'd calmed down, then gave me a blistering lecture and a hug, and got back into it again. The more flexible members of Ron's clan were with us, but Ron himself is still pretty nervous around me. Of course, the whole drunken morbid ranting at the wedding reception thing that happened, and the fact that Draco continually attempts to prove to Ron that he's gay for me simply due to my fabulous body probably doesn't help things out a lot either. Of course I dumped his little sister too, but that's another story.

So I leave the outrageous dungeon behind, I focus back on tea, and Luna.

I sit down next to her on the couch, which I think is a bit of a surprise for her, and she serves us some tea and biscuits.

I munch thoughtfully for a bit, and then turn to look at her.

"Ground rules, Luna," I say. She looks at me quizzically. "This week before you publish, or not publish as it may be: it might be good, it might suck, and there's a slim possibility that we'll be dead before then end of it. So I'll do my best not to act a part while I'm here, or bullshit you about anything. You might not like who I am now, but I won't pretend to be anything different."

She nods firmly. "I'll do you the same courtesy. I don't have a lot of experience being someone's girlfriend, of course, but I'll work that out as I go along. I do promise that I'll be Luna being your girlfriend, and not get carried away trying to act like Ginny being your girlfriend, for example."

I wince. "That would be wonderful. There's plenty of messy bitterness and angst there that it would be wonderful not to revisit."

"Yes, I rather thought there might be," she says with a smile. "Poor Gin did rather look like she'd bitten into an unripe persimmon for a second when I first mentioned you."

"Mmmm, I've never been able to look at a jelly mold quite the same way since she almost took my head off with one. Anyway, before I get carried away with pleasant reminiscences, the second point: feel free to totally ignore me most of the time. However, if we're in a combat situation, please do exactly as I say. You're probably really good at duelling. I haven't forgotten what you did back at the Ministry, or at Hogwarts, but I do have a solid seven or eight years of combat experience now."

"Yes, it's rather sad, that. But I'll do my best to pay attention and do what you say."

"And the final point. What do you want out of this whole girlfriend thing?"

"What?" she asks, a bit startled.

"Sorry," I say. "I don't mean that you're after anything from me. I'm just wondering what you're hoping for Luna. I mean, you want to cheer me up. That's good. I'm very excited about the new Happy Harry. But Lu, it has to be good for you as well, not just for me."

She stops and thinks for a little while, and finally replies after a minute or two.

"I want you to be there, and call me Lu like you just did. Or anything else, if you do it in that tone of voice. I want my friend Harry back, only as a bit more than a friend. Maybe as a lot more than a friend, um, eventually, you know?" She trails off, looking rather sheepish.

I consider it.

I feel like I'm suddenly on the edge of a precipice, and it's a totally unexpected one. I mean, I knew it was Luna I was going to be a bodyguard for, but this had an ominous feel to it. Not a bad sort of ominous, just deep. Once I take a step forward, I don't know how tall the cliff is, or how far I'm going to fall.

The alternative to making the jump is safer. Back up. Sorry Luna, no can do.

But I'm so damn tired.

I reach out and give her a quick hug with one arm. "Lu, that sounds fantastic to me. Thanks."

And it does.

She lets out the breath I didn't know she was holding with a whoosh, and shivers a bit. She's a brave one, putting herself on the line like that.

Did I mention that we might die this week? Suddenly now that I'm fighting for thousands of dead people plus one very alive Luna, it's made a bit of a difference.

Let them come.

I shuffle over until my shoulder bumps hers, and give her a big smile.

"Right, now that's positively the last deep conversation of the day. Tell me some good stories about Luna, and later on, we'll make dinner."

I'm answered by her brilliant, serene smile.

"Only if you're fully prepared to respond with some Harry stories of your own. Preferably happy ones, since there's no point dwelling in the past. Since we're aiming for the new Happy Harry, we have to start somewhere."

"Right, I'll do my best to think some up tonight. First though, The Tale of Luna."

"Well, right after Hogwarts, Dad and I headed to Africa to look for the good old crumple horn again. We were a bit off, as it turns out, when we were off in Sweden the summers before. So we scurried around all sorts of places for a while. Some things were really quite breathtakingly beautiful, you know Harry?"

"Well, I've heard one or two things of course, but officially I've never travelled outside the country, due to some rather complicated magical treaties. But it'd be amazing to travel a bit."

"Maybe I'll see about scheduling some vacation then. I'd love to travel with you, even, well, even just as friends would be good."

"Sure, friends to the end, no matter what; and travel is good too."

And I give her a smile, just so she knows I mean it.

"I'm hearing the faint beeping of my deepness alarm though, Lu," I say. "None of that," I continue, shaking an admonishing finger at her.

She chews on her fingernail in a contemplative sort of way.

"I think I'll do some ignoring of you, and get on with my story, if that's alright," she says, and gives me a tentative feeling nudge that accompanies her smile.

Obviously, she's not used to expressing herself physically. I hastily stop any further thoughts on that subject, specifically re: teaching her, before anything happens.

"So, while we were in Morocco, some months later, Dad heard some troubling news about the Rotfang Conspiracy through one of his contacts, and decided that we would have to take decisive action. Now, don't laugh, but his choice was that we should go undercover in Muggle London, acquire an understanding of dental technology, and proceed to help thwart the plot."

"I'm not laughing," I say carefully, but show her a tiny grin.

She nudges me again, happily.

"Now, you have to understand what it was like. Neither of us had ever spent much time in muggle London, so there was some pretty immense culture shock. Of course, you do understand, since coming to the magical world for the first time must have been much the same thing for you. A lot of other people didn't really understand though, which I suppose comes in later."

She looks slightly pained for a second.

"So we set up bank accounts, rented an apartment, set up a television, DVD players, computers, microwaves, and all of that. Learnt about them, taught ourselves to use them; I'm not sure many people understand what sort of massive task it was. I think Dad got through it by thinking that there were little imps hidden inside things doing all the work, instead of really trying to understand it. But to a lot of people, it just seemed like we'd vanished. I have to admit that I didn't take as much care keeping in touch as perhaps I should have, but everything was so new and exciting."

She looked at me, questioningly.

"I think I understand," I reply. "I mean, I would have immersed myself in magic and left the world I'd known before behind totally, if I didn't have to be back every summer to where I'd grown up. It's only lately that I've gotten back into things, but that's because I had money to pay for a nice apartment in London. And of course the muggle clubs are so much better it doesn't even really bear thinking about."

"Dad would agree with you totally. After a while he ended up working as a DJ. He's actually touring Europe now, I think."

She holds up a hand.

"Don't ask how it happened. I'm not sure I understand at all myself. When he was starting off, I was in the process of learning about computers and the internet, so I didn't notice much else that was going on for a while. I think he's put out a few albums though, maybe you've heard him if you've been clubbing a lot."

I shake my head.

"I'm not certain I even wanted to know that. I think it's better for now if I smile, and make a note to ask for some Luna on the internet stories later."

"Sometimes, I find that is much the best policy with Dad as well, you know? I mean the nodding and smiling of course. So, a few years went past with us totally wrapped up in our new lives and new world, and I suddenly realised that of course you and Hermione, among others, had grown up in this world, and I decided to get in touch with you. That was a year or so ago, and you can imagine."

"Suddenly my friend Harry was absurdly famous, and apparently equally unhappy. He was spending what seemed like all his time either killing people or things, and then going to wild parties with Draco Malfoy. So I hurried over to talk with Ron and Gin, and discovered that Gin was still rather upset with you, and so was Ron to some extent. What was worse for me was that both of them seemed to think that I'd deserted the magical world and run away from the war when I was needed. So they weren't really very happy to see me at all."

"You know," I say, "this whole girlfriend of Harry thing isn't going to increase your stock with them much."

"Well, they still haven't exactly been friendly towards me," she says with a bit of a sigh.

"And now when they see pictures of you in the Prophet, dancing scandalously with me at a club, they'll only think that I've brought you over to the dark side."

"I don't think Gin will be very happy with me being with you, either. I hate to say it, but I think she's still rather attracted to you, you know?"

"Yeah, I know. She wouldn't be so pissed with me if she wasn't," I say. I unintentionally grimace. I have to admit that not being as close to the Weasleys anymore, and in particular to Ron and Gin, weighs on me.

She leans up against me for a second. The warmth seems to travel straight through me and relaxes some of the tension I'm feeling.

Damn it. It seems this particular cliff is going to be a high one. I look over at her, and feel the familiar lurch inside. Her eyes meet mine, and yes, she's taking the same trip right alongside me.

There's nothing quite like this rush.

I pull back a bit, and firmly quash the reflex that's rising up in me. It's not necessary, and it's not welcome.

"I do feel that I should ask, Harry, about those photos of scandalous dancing."

"Ummm?"

"Well, you seem quite sure that there will be some."

"I might be able to prevent photos in the Prophet, if we're careful about it, but I can guarantee the scandalous dancing," I say, waggling my eyebrows at her.

"Harry, don't be silly, that isn't what I mean at all," she says with a laugh.

I hold up my hand, cutting her off.

"Believe me, even with my limited talents I can tell that this living room is screaming out for a disco ball and a dance floor that lights up when you step on it."

"I mean, if you don't want to be seen," she tries.

I cut her off again by forming an X in front of my chest with my forearms and making a game show buzzer noise.

"BZZZT! Angsting of any type denied. Anyway, Lu," I say to her, "19 out of 20 people surveyed say that you're hotter than the center of the sun, and the 20th person spoiled their ballot in their excitement."

"No, shut up Harry, I'm being serious," she says, laughing out loud.

"Look," I say, putting a hand on hers, "I'm being serious too. I mean, I'm sure you've probably seen the pics of me with a bunch of witches. But thinking about them would be dwelling in the past, exhibit A, and New Happy Harry doesn't dwell in the past. For the next week until you publish I'm dwelling right here with you, and you, my poor dear, are the witch that I'm with now. I'm not screwing around with you, Lu, really. You'll have to trust me on this one."

She turns her hand over, and looks down at where we're holding hands.

I rub my thumb over the back of her hand a bit, and sit there.

Minutes pass. For me, it's wonderful. A lot like some of my daydreams of her, all those years ago, actually; alone with Luna, holding her hand.

Merlin only knows what she's thinking about. I hope she isn't brooding, but at the moment I've done all I can.

Eventually, she looks up at me again.

"Ok, Harry," she says. "I'll have to trust you on that, won't I? Otherwise things won't even really start. So I'll believe for now that you see something in me that's quite special, and sometime, you can tell me what it is."

"Groovy," I reply with a smile. "Shall we get started on some supper then?"

The rest of the night, happily, passes in quiet conversation about the wizarding world, favourite books, and the like.

I send her off to bed early, and mentally crossing one day off the calendar, I head to the basement to check on the dungeon.

One head lies moaning in a corner, while the other hunches around in circles with the one shoulder still attached screaming, as promised, something about bats.

I take some Kodak moment type pictures, and get ready for bed. Hooked to the ceiling in one corner of the kitchen with a levitation spell, I lie facing down, with a huge number of magical alarms woven around me and the house.

That, I think, was quite a busy day.

And I fall asleep.

* * *

Well, that took somewhat longer than a week, of course. I'm a slow writer anyway, and a variety of exams and jobs didn't speed things up at all. Hope some readers are still around for this.

Also, if anyone wants to proofread for me, that would be sweet. Just let me know.


	4. Divers Alarums

**Chapter 4 – Divers Alarums**

* * *

I woke up early the next morning, as is usual for me. I looked straight down at the floor from where I hung suspended, stretched, and sighed.

Regrettably in my life, hanging from ceilings to sleep is also fairly common.

I cancel the camouflage spell, the levitation spell, and the drool catching spell, and drop to the floor.

Yes, a drool catching spell.

I learnt it from a vampire who, only after we were close friends, revealed some of the drawbacks of classic stereotypical activities like hanging from the ceiling like a bat: namely soggy patches on the Persian rug below in your gloomy atmospheric boudoir.

What a faux pas.

Anyway, I grab some fresh cloths from my trunk, run through a litany of cleaning spells, and secure a number of hazardous items about my person. I anticipate a somewhat more serious incursion today, and it's always good to be prepared.

I strike some overdone Bond, James Bond poses in front of the hall mirror. Or maybe I'm closer to Steve McQueen in Bullit. Either way you look at it, I am the sexy.

I go in search of an apron. It wouldn't do to get any grease spatters on my cloths while I produce a magnificent breakfast. And yes, I'm so in touch with the hotness within that wearing an apron doesn't make me look goofy at all. I hope.

As I suspected, Luna, like most humans, is unable to resist the smell of bacon being cooked in the morning, and stumbles into the kitchen wearing a dressing gown as I plate out a hearty breakfast for each of us.

"G'mornin," she mumbles, her eyes fixing on the mug of coffee I've made for her.

"Mornin' hot stuff," I say, saluting her with a spatula. "I suspected that you might follow stereotype for a newspaper editor, and prepared some brutally strong coffee for you."

"Mmm… fresh coffee," she groans, shambling towards the table with her arms out in front of her like a zombie.

Huh, only eight o'clock in the morning, and I'm already smiling.

She sees me smile out of the corner of her eye, and relaxes, slumping into the chair at the table, and looking over her breakfast.

"This looks heavenly. Is that really a fresh blueberry muffin?"

"Absolutely. And none of your foul, pre-made mix rubbish, neither," I say. "Luckily, there are others left which might be quite good at lunch time as well."

Luna would have answered me, but she has good manners, and her mouth is currently full.

After several minutes of appreciative noises, she pauses, and asks, "Do you do this for all the people you bodyguard for, Harry?"

"No, only the really special ones," I reply with another smile.

"So I'm part of a select group then." She ponders for a moment. "Do you do breakfast in bed?"

"I don't know, are you offering to be breakfast?"

She stares at me for a couple seconds while her mind catches up, and then bursts into hysterical laughter, clutching at her sides.

It takes her a few minutes to get over it, wipe her eyes, blow her nose, and look back up at me.

I'm not expecting the effect, and it feels a bit like a troll's club hitting my guts. Her hair is still toussled from sleep, her eyes are shining with laughter, and her cheeks are still a bit flushed. Wrapped up in her 'strange magical creatures' print dressing gown, I find her absolutely delectable. Even worse than that, deep down inside a traitorous part of me whispers that twenty years from now, we could be having just the same morning together.

From the flush that gets even higher in her cheeks, it isn't just me.

She looks down at her plate again, and we both munch away at breakfast for a bit.

Luna clears her throat and meets my eyes again.

"I have to say, even in my hopeful estimates, I hadn't considered that things would work out quite this well. At least, based on data from my perspective."

"You're such a Ravenclaw, you know?" I say with a grin. "But you're right. Data collection shall proceed, of course, but early analysis shows very promising results."

"Don't be a dork, Harry," she says with a light smile, waving a rasher of bacon about in the air on the tines of her fork, "leave data collection to me and stick with the Gryffindor stuff you're good at."

I wince theatrically.

"I never was any good at poetry. Anyway, the Gryffindor way seems to be rather full of Victorian melodrama to me, full of vows, lockets with bits of hair, and shit like that."

"That's a bit surprising from the Gryffindor posterboy. Or maybe not, since rather a lot of that is an act."

"Yup," I say. "You know that I almost got sorted into Slytherin?"

"No, really?"

So as we finish breakfast and wash up, I tell her the tale of my sorting. There aren't that many people who know it.

As I put the last plate on the draining board, I turn to her.

"Maybe you should get changed now, Lu."

"No lounging about then? You run a tight ship here, Captain Harry."

"Not quite. It's more a 'by the pricking of my thumbs, something evil, this way comes' sort of moment in fact."

"Right then," she says, and runs up the stairs.

In this case, it was more the faint twanging of a wide range perimeter ward, but still. I throw a drying charm, sort the dishes away, and put a sticking charm on the cupboard doors. No sense in having readymade shrapnel lying about.

By this point, showing a flair for the practical, Luna is back downstairs, dressed and cleaned up.

I derail any thoughts I might have about how nicely she's cleaned up, and focus on information from the wards.

"What's up, Harry," she asks, her wand out and in her hand.

"But soft," I say, "what light through yonder window breaks?"

A faint shriek is heard outside.

"It is the east, and it's a death eater who's just triggered a flame ward."

"You know," she says with a grimace, "the original was much more romantic. What do you think is going to happen?"

"Well, I'd expect that since the first two chaps didn't turn up at all, and they haven't heard anything, they sent a few more to sneak around and see what's going on. Still quite expendable, but much more cautious now."

"What are we going to do?"

"I was just considering that, actually. See, this lot will never make it through the wards that are set up, so they'll creep around for a few hours and eventually perish in various interesting ways. But this is tedious for us, and they might figure out more of the wards than we should let them do."

"So we sally forth and do some smiting?"

"It would be only me sallying forth actually," I say, and hold up an hand to forestall her comments. "Just to clarify, this isn't me letting my testosterone run free and wild. This is because you will still be safer inside your house, and you being safe is the whole point of this. Second, it's also because my intent would be to ensure their lives were nasty, brutish, and above all, short, and for as long as possible we both want to keep you from getting involved in that sort of thing."

My mind spins a bit. This whole thing is a bit like a chess game. A battle is also a good analogy.

Even though we don't have elephants with us, things are somewhat parallel.

I turn to Luna.

"I should be away for about five minutes, I should think. While I'm away, you can check on the languishing prisoners, and start some more tea."

She nods.

"Also, so I can explain what the plan is, you can also ponder Hannibal at the battle of Cannae. And no, this has nothing at all to do with elephants."

She looks perplexed, which is a novel expression on her face.

Then I'm invisible, and out the door.

I find the intruders gathered around their rather charred friend, which is convenient, but poor tactical planning on their part.

They weren't expecting me and my sword to be there with them, so they don't last long at all, and in under two minutes I'm back inside the house, my sword already cleaned with a spell.

Young fools. Just for a second or two, it really hurts. That was probably their first big assignment from their secretive superior. Maybe it was an older relative of one of them. Maybe they'd got quite good marks, and done quite well in secret training camps they'd been away to after school. Maybe they weren't really bad at all, just some misguided kids. And then they met up with me. Unlike Draco, they were never going to have a chance at being better because I'd just killed them all in cold blood.

Ah well. I seal that one away deep inside. One more piece of emotional baggage for me to reclaim from the luggage carousel someday. Maybe if I'm really lucky, the airline of life will send it to Newark instead and I'll never have to see it again.

So five minutes after I left, I'm lounging on the couch in her living room, discussing elephants with Luna, with no sign of what I'd been doing. Such was the beauty of the persona I'd built for myself.

"So, explain the elephants, Harry," she said, pouring out some tea for me. Again, she was looking quite fetching in some dungarees and a high neck embroidered Chinese vest.

"Well, long, long ago, in a country not so far away from here, a rather famous general from northern Africa, Hannibal by name, decided that in order to crush the roman empire he had to march a bunch of elephants across the alps."

I take a sip of tea. Very nice.

"He was wrong of course, since cold and unhappy elephants plus mountain trails equal avalanches galore, but he did the trick with normal soldier types anyway. The battle in question was that of Cannae, and the result was a lot of dead Romans. See, he got them to attack him, drew more and more of their forces in to attacking the center of his line, which was pushed backward by the pressure of the attack. Sadly for the Romans, this put the ends of his line all the way around the outside of all of them, and much unpleasantness ensued, at least from their perspective."

"I see, and in this situation, as it relates to us, I am an elephant," Luna asks, obviously poking fun at me.

"No, perhaps we shall be the heroic center of the line that holds firm, drawing more and more forces against us which are then mopped up by the others attacking their sides and back."

"Right, somehow I've never quite pictured myself like that but I'll take your word for it, Harry," she says.

"Perhaps if I demonstrate," I ask. At her nod, I gesture proudly to the tray with tea and biscuits on it.

"In that case, the breakfast teatime theatre company presents a reconstruction of the battle of Cannae, staring the assembled biscuit corps, and Marty the blueberry muffin as an elephant."

Much fun was had in the process. Feeding Luna the Roman troops by hand was a highpoint for me, but she was far more interesting than biscuits.

About half an hour later on, Luna was wiping the crumbs off her mouth, and asking the question I knew she would eventually work her way around to.

"So why did this occur to you this morning, Harry?"

"Well, because there was a watcher on the hill to see what happened to the expendable types below. I could have chased him down, but I chose to let him report on what happened. What he saw will let him know it was me or someone like me here with you, which will cause him to panic, and call in all the reinforcements they can lay their hands on."

"But, Harry, doesn't that mean that everything you were saying about keeping me safe was bullshit?"

"What?" I ask, somewhat confused.

"Obviously our safety isn't your primary concern, because otherwise you wouldn't have made the choice you did. So, either there's a Dark Nargle infestation in your clothing trunk, or you aren't telling me everything."

"Well," I try.

"Neither of those things are good, Harry Potter," she says, sitting back and crossing her arms over her chest. "Make your explanation a good one, because we were getting along quite well."

I pause, somewhat taken aback by the sudden change in conversation.

To prevaricate or not, that is the question.

I sigh.

"You're right, of course," I say. "The whole point of this is to eliminate all the crooked swine in the ministry. Now, they're trying to kill you so you can't expose them. Of course, you weren't actually going to publish an expose, but they don't know that, and it's just as effective this way anyway because they still think they have to stop you."

I stop and make eye contact with a still-frowning Luna.

"The more they panic about the situation, the more mistakes they'll make, and the more likely it is that we'll be able to nab them for something. So that's why I'm here making people panic, because there's no way the ministry would have assigned someone important like me to protect you unless you really did have vital information."

I hold up a biscuit to forestall her commentary.

"So, that's story one, ok?" I say, "But, aside from that goal, there's a personal one for me, which is Luna protection. Now, you remember that little problem I had back at Hogwarts?"

"Which one in particular, Harry," she asks, raising an eyebrow.

Hmmm, ouch. Ok, I'm obviously not off the hook yet.

"I meant the 'saving people' complex actually," I inform her. "Anyway, point being that if you think that I'd let a friend of mine, let alone a brand spanking new other of significance get themselves hurt, you're totally wrong. Even if bad things happen, I do have a couple unplottable safehouses that you'll end up in, and I promise you that. So don't worry about that."

Luna sighs, and looks away.

"Silly rabbit, I know you wouldn't let anything happen to me," she says. "Although it's good to know that I figure in your calculations as a significant other."

She turns back and meets my eyes again.

"But you're missing my point. It's just as important to me that you keep yourself safe as well. So please, Harry, remember that you're not a Snorkak amongst the corn stalks before you decide to take the world on this time."

She wags a finger at me.

"So no Griffie heroics that involve self-sacrifice to save anyone, cause massive destruction, or well, other bad things. There's a lot of things that I haven't had a chance to talk to you about yet, and I don't intend to cross the veil quite yet to do it."

"And what sort of things are those," I ask.

"Well, Grindletubes, and conspiracy theories, and nargles, and back issues of the Quibbler, and why you didn't kiss me under the mistletoe in my fifth year. All sorts of things."

"I won't say I'm sorry that I didn't explain the whole situation straight away," I tell her. "But I should have factored your desire to understand things more into the equation. As for those things to talk about, we can cover one of them right now," I say.

"Don't tell me you already know about Grindletubes? We thought there was more ministry involvement than they admitted to us."

"I'm afraid not, it's actually about the mistletoe thing, sort of," I say, wincing a bit, mentally.

"Oh, well that's much less interesting, but it may be a more appropriate topic for talking about over tea anyway," she says.

"Less important? I'll have you know I spent nights agonizing over why I hadn't just gone ahead and done what I wanted to," I say with a grin. "I suppose part of it was the shock, because I'd been thinking about something totally different."

"For a Griffie, you seem to have a talent for over-thinking things, Harry," she says with a laugh. "It would have been a lot more fun all around if you'd gone ahead and snogged me senseless, don't you think? Image the rumours."

We both laugh, and fall into a slightly uncomfortable silence.

"Of course, I wanted you to," she says after a while. "I'd thought about you all that summer, you know, after your fifth year." She looks down at the table, and pushes some biscuit crumbs around with her finger.

"I felt so close to you for some reason, and all through that summer I kept feeling waves of sadness that felt like they were coming from you, somehow," she continued, looking down at her lap. "That, and you kept showing up in all my dreams, watching me, or running through fields chasing baby snorkaks. That sort of thing."

I'm suddenly struck with a half remembered dream where I'd been scrambling through a field of wildflowers with Luna, chasing something.

"That's funny, because I kept thinking about what you said about your mother, and you kept on showing up in my dreams as well," I say. "Although I'm not sure what a Snorkak looks like, I do remember chasing something with you in a field."

"Hmmm, so that's why you were so useless at blocking it's way then," Luna ponders.

"So you really think we shared dreams?" I ask.

"Well, give it a shot. Fill me in on one that you remember well and I'll see if I remember it," she says, sounding eager.

I think for a bit.

"Well, there was one dream where we were out in a shopping mall, and you kept hugging me, and running off to look at the displays."

She stops and thinks for a minutes.

"Yes, I think I do remember that. It was one of the first times that I hugged you in a dream. Come to think of it, we spent a lot of time..."

She trails off.

"Well, I do remember quite a few other dreams, but I didn't want to start off with them," I say, feeling defensive for some reason.

Luna looks up and beams at me.

"We must have been sharing dreams, Harry, that's the only possible explanation," she says, and continues. "You also have to know, that there's only one possible cause for all this, and it's terribly exciting," she says.

"Really? Do you think someone was implanting memories in our minds, or something like that?" I ask.

"Why, Harry, that sounds almost like a consipiracy theory, which would normally be intriguing of course. In this case, it's a tiny bit disturbing that your first guess is evil mind controlling forces, but there you are. I actually meant that we might have developed some sort of magical synchronicity with each other."

"Never heard of it," I say cheerfully. "It sounds good though."

"Well, absolutely. If I had to guess, I'd say that, well, the danger we shared at the Department of M, and I certainly felt close enough to you after to share about my mother. Maybe you could think of us being surrounded by… well, giant glue balls that cover our whole body. When we get close to each other, then our glue balls would sort of stick together, and when we moved apart again they'd form a thin filament between us."

"Mmm, so magical synchronicity is a glue ball we shared? It's how the French say… Ah, l'amour: c'est un grande balle de colle."

"It seems like you had a goofball, not a glue ball," she says with a grin. "But no, it seems that our magic was what stuck, and formed a conduit between the two of us. At least it certainly could be that. I suspect we'll have to do quite a bit of research on this to be sure though."

"So we were able to communicate with each other somehow that way, while we were asleep?" I ask. "It sounds plausible to me as well. I mean, magic has certainly done some weirder things than that. Plus, come to think of it, I've managed to do some other things through accidental magic, so it doesn't seem to be so out of the question that if I'd really felt a deep need to connect with someone, that it would have done that as well."

"Gosh. Well, once this is all over and done with, I have some owls to send out. That's quite an interesting theory."

I get up and walk over to her, and motion her to stand up as well.

She does, and I surprise her by wrapping my arms around her. I look down into her eyes.

"Still, whatever the technical reason, you gave me the best dreams I've ever had. Thanks, Lu."

I give her a hug, just like the many we shared in our dreams, and I feel exactly the same sense of comfort and peace.

Alarm bells start to ring in my head.

Danger, Harry Potter! Danger!

I begin to suspect that this is feeling suspiciously close to emotional involvement on my part.

Luna interrupts my thoughts though, pulling away a bit and looking up at me.

"Harry," she says, her eyes wider even than usual. Then she looks down, blushing a bit, but after a minute a tiny smirk forms on her face.

"You remember the dream where we started in the middle of the great hall, and then eventually flew up and up, through the roof, into the sky, and eventually into the sun?" she asks.

Did I?

Comprehension dawns for me, as I think back and remember that particular dream and waking up, gasping and covered in sweat when we hit the sun together. Well, mostly sweat.

I consider, somewhat salaciously, that it was only the first time I found myself in that situation, but of course all the other times there was someone else waking up with me.

I was, however, unprepared for her next comment.

She meets my eyes again and says, "You give good dream, Harry Potter."

Of course, after a statement like that, there's no alternative at all but to snog her senseless as I probably should have done all those years ago.

So I do.

All goes very well indeed, and might have continued and gotten even better if someone behind us hadn't chosen that moment to say, "Oh dear, sorry for interrupting!"

* * *

END CHAPTER 4 

Well, sorry about the long wait. Work has unfortunately got in the way of writing quite a bit. Damn it. The next chapter should be out sooner, though, as I'm almost finished it as it is.

Cheers everyone, and thanks for continuing to read.


	5. Not a House Elf

Disclaimer: I disclaim. Everything.

Chapter 5 – Not a House Elf

* * *

After a moment of shock, I spring back from Luna and look around.

It wasn't the head of someone who'd been horribly splicing porting in.

It wasn't anyone I could see, which was lucky because I'd probably have vapourised them on general principles, but that was almost out of the question anyway, because there was simply no way that anyone could have got near the house without me knowing it.

"That was even better than the dream," says Luna behind me, and I turn back to look at her. She gives me a huge smile and generally puts out so many happy Luna vibes that I can't help but grin back at her.

Then she focuses behind me.

"Oh, Hello there," she says. "Please come in."

I turn around to see a head poking through the wall of the house.

"I'm awfully sorry," it exclaims, "I would have knocked of course, otherwise, but…"

"You're a ghost," I say, perceptive as always.

She steps into the room and drops a curtsy.

"Yes, ah, I'm honoured to meet you, Mr. Potter. Sir. And um, Miss Lovegood. I'm, ah, Amy Ffrench-Constant."

And she curtsies again.

I turn to Luna and ask, "You have many ghosts visiting your house?"

"No, not many at all, but it's always fun to chat with them. I did often at Hogwarts you know."

I turn to the ghost again. She's wearing a Hogwarts uniform, average height, pale skin even before she died, dark hair in a short bob, and quite certainly skinny. She reminds me a bit of a rather nervous small animal for some reason, with her big dark eyes darting around the room, looking at everything.

"Amy, if I can call you that," I begin.

"Oh, yes, please do, Mr. Potter, sir," she says, mid curtsy.

"So, to what do we owe the pleasure of your company?" I ask, politely, since intense politeness seemed to be the tone of this conversation.

"Well, I, ah, decided to haunt you, Mr. Potter, Sir," the ghost squeaks and rushes on "if that's alright with you, of course. Sir."

"Ah, of course," I manage to say, "and you would be wanting to do that because?"

"Well, ummm… you just killed me, Sir," she says, bashfully. "But don't misunderstand, Mr. Potter, Sir, I'm ever so grateful to you."

"You killed this girl outside, just now, just before you came back in and had tea with me?" asks Luna.

"Yes Miss, and he did a simply wonderful job too," says Amy, gushing. "He touched my back, and I just sort of faded away without any pain at all. I hope you don't think me too vain if I'm quite happy I won't be haunting you carrying my head about in a basket or anything, Sir."

"Huh, that must have been my adaptation of Big Barney Braithwaite's Bi-Valve Bisector, which was originally used by fishermen to shell oysters," I say, quite proudly actually.

It's good to know that it doesn't cause any pain either.

"That's quite brilliant, Sir. I wish I'd been able to take a class from you, Mr. Potter, Sir."

I sigh.

"Hold on, before we get carried away with congratulating me for killing yet another person, let's sit down and talk."

I turn to Luna.

"I'm sorry, Lu. I warned you about the romance bit, and about me as well," I say with a bit of a shrug.

She looks at me, moves closer to me, and looks deep into my eyes.

"Does it hurt you, Harry?" she asks. "When you do something like that?"

Being macho would be a stupid idea right now, so I nod, and let go of some of the memories I've kept over the years and let them come bubbling up to the surface.

She heaves a sigh, and reaches up to cup my cheek. "We'll have to do something about this, Harry. I can't have you walking around trying to hide that sort of thing. It attracts Nifflers, you know."

I smile at her, and force the memories back down. The truth is a good thing. Also on the plus side is the well known fact that the tragic flaw or 'help-out-the-poor-puppy' weakness adds serious points to a chap's hotness.

I wonder if I'll be able to make the ghost faint, and what will happen if I do.

I glance over at her watching us, her hands clasped in front of her chest. If she was capable of it, she'd have hearts in her eyes. No question about it, there's a bit of fun to be had there, provided she isn't a nuisance. If she is, I'll go somewhere quiet and use an AK on her. That should work.

"Oh, please, don't feel at all bad on my account, sir," says Amy. "Really, I was quite hoping something would happen to me."

"Goodness, well, it seems that we have quite a bit to talk about," says Luna. "After all, if you're going to be haunting Harry, we'll have to get to know you much better."

Luna looks around questioningly.

"I'd offer you some biscuits, but that wouldn't be too helpful for you, would it?"

Amy giggles happily.

"Actually, hold on," I say, as some vague memory surfaces from the depths of my brain. "Do you have any chopsticks, Lu?"

"Why, yes, I think I do. I'll get them, shall I?" she responds.

"And a bowl too, just in case," I suggest. "It might make things easier."

"Oh, that's quite Ravenclaw of you, Harry," she calls from the kitchen. "You're thinking of making a food offering to the dead, right?"

"Got it in one," I say, "and impressively bloody brilliant, as always, Lu."

"This is simply wonderful," says Amy, "I always had an idea what it would be like to be around really wonderful people like you and Miss Lovegood, but… you're both so incredible."

"Well, you know," I say with a wink, "it takes a pretty amazing person to be this totally brilliant. But don't sell yourself short, you know? It takes real strength of will to become a ghost in the first place, and to adjust to it and manifest so quickly is impressive indeed. Ten points to Slitherin, and all that."

She looks at me, awestruck.

"H..how did you know?"

I point down to the house crest on her school uniform.

"Oh, right, I'd forgotten I was wearing that now."

Luna came back from the kitchen, and we all sat down.

I stuck a pair of chopsticks upright in a bowl with a few biscuits in it, clapped my hands together, and bowed my head in a short prayer.

"Go ahead, you can take one of them now," I say, gesturing to the biscuits.

Amy reaches over, and grabs all four of them, her hand passing through the solid items and coming out the other side holding a small collection of ghostly tea biscuits.

She nibbles on the corner of one speculatively, and smiles happily.

"Thanks ever so, I was feeling a bit peckish."

"Well, what do you know, it worked," I say.

"Harry, you sound surprised," says Luna, questioningly.

"Well, I really had no idea whether it would work or not, but I figured it was worth a go. Plus, it was really belief that it was going to work that was the most important part of it anyway, so I couldn't say anything like that beforehand."

"For someone who seems very practical, you do seem to have a very mystic approach to magical things," Luna comments.

"That's at least partially due to where I grew up," I say. "After all, for someone like a Weasley, magic is something you see every day the whole time you're growing up, and it does practical things. For me, I didn't have that, so magic is, well, magical, right?"

"That's the way I feel about the muggle world," says Luna. "Which is just fine, because that means that between the two of us, we should be able to see anything at all as magical; and that, I think, is a very good thing indeed."

I smile over at Luna, and feel pleased as she smiles back. Merlin's flaming beard, that ghost could have waited for a few more minutes before she interrupted us.

"Anyway, I'm sure you know far too much about me already, Amy, but feel free to ask anything you'd like," I say. "But we'd both love to hear more about you, as well."

"Well, I just graduated at the end of last year, but, well, I wasn't too happy," says Amy, bowing her head a bit. "You see, I quite like to watch people, and in fourth year, I saw something I shouldn't have, but I didn't tell anyone about it. Mostly because they found out eventually and said that they'd make sure I'd get expelled as well if I told on them. If that had happened my parents really would have killed me."

"You're one of the Ffrench-Constants from the south, are you?" I ask.

"Well, yes, the youngest of them, Sir," Amy replies.

I nod at her. We'd investigated her parents a few times, and we were fairly sure they were dark through and through. I can see how a daughter like this one wouldn't really fit into the family plans for world domination.

"So, in fifth year, they blackmailed me into doing something at the school which was fairly bad, and then used that to blackmail me into more trouble," she continues, tearing up. "It just got worse and worse. Students in the other houses hated me because I was doing things, and they hated me in my house because they had to force me to do things instead of me being happy about it, and they hated me at home because I wasn't really like them at all."

She breaks into tears in earnest.

"And then they forced me to come here with them, and I knew something horrible was going to happen, and I didn't really care, and it did and now I'm dead."

Luna gets up and walks over to the sobbing girl to comfort her, but it's difficult to do that with a ghost. There's no way to give a hug to something insubstantial, and Luna looked at me helplessly as the girl continued to cry into her hands.

I walk over, concentrate, push my magic down into my hand, and rest my hand on the ghost's back between her shoulder blades.

Her head jerks up, and she looks up at me in shock.

She whispers "Mr. Potter…" and slowly disapperates.

Luna looks at me.

"Harry, you didn't do anything to her, did you?"

"No, of course not, Lu," I say. "It was probably all just a bit much for her, and she wasn't expecting to actually feel anything touching her. She'll be back again once she's had a chance to pull herself together."

"So she could feel you when you do that with your magic?"

"Just a little bit," I say. "Some ghost told me a while ago that it feels a bit like a warm breeze or something."

I sigh.

"It really takes it out of you though. It isn't easy to use magic like that, I have to say."

Luna crosses over to me and surprises me by reaching around me and giving me a hug.

"You really aren't a bad sort, are you," she says. "I suppose it was out of the question to just stun them and turn them in to the ministry?"

"I suppose I could have. That was probably what they expected when they sent those kids in here to check things out. An auror wouldn't just wack some sweet little kiddies. Arrest them, sure, but then they'd pay their way out with no harm done."

"I'd like to think you're joking about that, Harry," says Luna, "but I can see you aren't. How sad that the magical world would be like this now."

"So, instead, I do it this way. I remove all their heirs, get some powerful old families pissed at us, and hopefully they do something horribly illegal to try and get even. After all, they'd never be able to prosecute. There weren't any witnesses, I only tossed three totally innocuous spells, and I'm Harry Potter; nobody would believe it."

I hug her a bit tighter.

"It's not the way it should be, Lu. You know sometimes I really feel betrayed. The magical world was supposed to be magical, you know? It shouldn't be even worse than the cupboard I crawled out of."

"Well," Luna says, somewhat hesitantly, "maybe you can make it a bit more magical again."

"You going to help with that?" I ask.

"I would love to do anything I can, provided that you try and be a bit more, well, Good. You hero mask seems to be slipping a bit, Harry, and if you're going to wear it you're going to have to put a bit more effort into taking care of it."

I look down into Luna's silvery grey eyes, and experience a dangerously cheesy moment of romance.

There's something about this whole thing that's coaxing out the inner Harry who did some really stupidly heroic things when he was much younger.

"Luna, with you I may not even have to wear a mask to be heroic."

She goggles at me for a moment, before quickly stepping backwards out of my arms.

"Sorry, I was feeling the urge to do something very distracting, and at least for me. Last time I wouldn't have noticed if every ward in the house went off."

I heave a deep and theatrical sigh.

"Bugger. You're quite right of course," I say. "Curse my desire to be responsible, and all that."

"That feeling is quite mutual, Harry Potter," she says.

"You're not helping things, you know," I say, "by looking like you are, and saying my name in that tone of voice."

"Oh. Oh, right, well," she says, and turns away for a few seconds.

I clear my throat.

"If I may suggest an alternative, we could spend the afternoon watching movies on my specially shielded TV/DVD player."

"Shielded?" she asks.

"Well, otherwise it probably wouldn't work here, and that would be a crime against humanity. Do you have any preference for movie choice?"

"No, I think I'll let you decide the first one," she says. "After all, seeing what you choose, assuming that you'll choose something that you think I'll like, will be very informative."

"Oh hell, this was supposed to be relaxing and such," I complain. "Now I'm experiencing a serious case of movie choice performance anxiety. Can you at least give me a hint?"

"Well, I'm feeling kindly towards you right now, Harry, so I suppose I'll give you a hand. I'd like to share with you that my favourite movie of all time doesn't have Patrick Swayze in it."

"Golly, well that certainly narrows it down. Lucky as well, I was just about to put 'Roadhouse' in to play."

"Harry!"

"Ok, sorry, I know, uttering the name of… that film… well, it gives it power over you. At least that's what I've heard. You're right to be careful."

"You, Harry Potter, are being silly," she says. "Not that I object too much, but hurry up and choose while I make us some popcorn."

Much popping occurred, and we settled down with a few butterbeers to wait out the siege.

I started the movie, and we began to watch. Luna begins to comment.

"That looks a bit like Snape's potions lab, doesn't it?"

"Why is he spanking himself with his clipboard?"

Soon, however, she's actually rolling on the floor laughing. Obviously her jaunt in the world of the Muggles hadn't prepared her, for Mystery Science Theatre 3000, The Movie.

"I'm surprised you didn't run across these shows, you know. It's exactly the sort of fringe culture thing that I would have expected you to be into," I commented when it finished.

"Really, I had no idea about it," she says. "We can watch more of them later, but first it's my turn to choose."

She puts a disk in the player, and bounces up and down on the couch waiting for it to start.

"Luna, my dear," I say, "Somehow I wasn't expecting to watch Conan The Barbarian as our second selection this evening."

"Well, I have to keep you guessing, don't I? Anyway, it also contains the most unintentionally hilarious line I've ever heard in a movie."

"I'll have to watch out for it," I say, and grab another handful of popcorn.

Luna wraps her arms around one of mine, and leans up against my side. Regardless of content, I feel sure that I'll enjoy watching the film thoroughly.

The first time I'd watched it, I expected to be amused by unplanned comedic value, but I actually discovered that it isn't a horrible film. I completely miss the line though, even when Luna starts howling with laughter part way through the movie.

"So what was it, anyway?"

"What was what, Harry?"

"The hilarious line that you told be about before we started watching," I remind her.

"Oh, so that's why you didn't react at all," she says. "I thought you'd spotted it and hadn't found it funny at all, and I was feeling a bit bad."

"Nope, missed it totally," I say.

"Well, ok. You know when they're talking to the old guy to get information?"

"I think, so," I reply, thinking back through the film we'd just finished.

"Well, what he says is 'The snakes of Set? A few years ago they were just another snake cult. Now, everywhere." says Luna, assuming a old man accent.

"Ummm, ok," I prompt.

"Well, silly, it means that there are simply hundreds of snake cults just sort of hanging about, doing snake cult-y sorts of things, and nobody pays much attention to them," she explains. "Like, you're talking to a friend and you ask who lives next door, and they tell you, 'oh, it's just another snake cult, they're fairly quiet except for the ritual chanting on Wednesday nights'. It's a bit like a Monty Python skit, really, isn't it?"

She looks at me, somewhat hopefully, with her head tilted to one side.

I start to laugh, and I see her worried look turn into a huge smile.

Eventually I manage to ask her a question.

"So does that mean that Voldemort and his death eaters were really just another snake cult?"

"Harry, I'd never quite thought of it like that, you know? How sad for Tom though, demeaned by an old man in a slightly overdone swords and sorcery film."

"It was the similarity of my relative's place to The Wheel of Pain they strapped Conan to that should have tipped me off. Luna, I am Conan the Barbarian. See, I have the same muscles."

She delights me by breaking out in laughter again. Eventually she sighs and stretches.

"I was a bit worried, Harry. I know that my sense of humour is, well, a little off-beat, and I didn't know whether you'd laugh at the same things at all. My research hadn't told me much about that. You didn't laugh in public, so I didn't have many data points to go on."

"Not to worry. I think we'll do just fine, right?"

"Mmm, splendid. Now, does my meal service include dinner, or shall I make something for us?"

"Perhaps we can labour in companionable unison, or something like that," I suggest. "You'll have to show me the food you have left over that needs using."

"Well, we could do something with the cucumbers. Then we wouldn't have to worry about them attracting Kappa."

"I thought they're found in Japan," I ask.

"Well, you never know. One could be here on vacation, after all."

And we fix dinner. It's a bit clumsy because we aren't used to being in the kitchen with another person, but we finally manage to muddle through it.

We're sitting down for the third movie selection, a mutual decision for 'Monty Python and the Holy Grail', when I notice a shimmer in the air next to the couch.

"Hi, Amy," I say. "Come sit down and join us."

She snaps into focus.

"Oh! Thank you, sir. That made it much easier for me. I, um, do have to say, sir, you seem to be, well, rather blasé about me haunting you."

"Don't worry, I don't have any other people haunting me that you'll have to get into turf fights with. I suppose you could put it down to a long history of strange and unexpected things," I say. "On my personal freaky-shit-that-happens-to-me scale from one to ten you're a very pleasant and polite three or four. So, no worries. I expect you'll have more trouble adjusting to the things that happen around me than the other way around."

"I'm already a six or seven on his scale, so you'd have to work harder at it to show up at all," says Luna with smile and a dismissive wave.

"Well, I'll do my best to adjust, Sir," says my personal ghost.

"Good to know," I say. "But you'll have to stop calling me 'sir', ok? I'm not that old."

"Well, wouldn't it be, impolite to address you in a more familiar fashion?" she asks.

"I shouldn't think so," puts in Luna. "From what I know, you'll be haunting him until the day he dies, or maybe until you decide to pass on. Either way, you should address both of us in familiar terms, right Harry?"

"Well, I certainly think so," I say. "I try not to even let my subordinates in the auror office say anything like that, and they certainly don't have the same opportunities to peek at me in the shower that you will."

Amy Ffrench-Constant looks appropriately scandalised, and starts to glow with a faint pink light. There's something a tiny bit Slitherin in those huge innocent eyes though. I give her a week at the outside before she gives in and takes a look.

Luna clears her throat in a tone that manages to suggest in a very faint sort of way that she was rather looking forward to that sort of thing herself.

"Anyway, come sit down, we'll offer you some popcorn, and you can watch a movie with us."

"Thank you, Luna, Harry," she says, with her head a bit bowed so that she's looking at us through the fringe of her hair. Either she's pretty calculating about the way she acts, or the 'I'm so cute and defenceless' look she projects is part of a unconscious strategy she's used up to this point to stay alive in the poisonous atmosphere of her family and school life.

Not that I'm dropping my guard yet, of course. You don't live like I have for as long as I have and still get thrown off your game by appearances. If she tries anything, she'll find out that a pleasant warm breeze is only that start of what focusing my magic will feel like to a ghost.

She settles in mid air near the arm of the couch next to me.

"Sorry, I'd float someplace else, but I find things easier when I'm closer to you, um, Harry. Oh, I say, is this one of those Tele Vision things the muggle students would talk about?"

Luna and I smile at each other, and set out to warp the mind of our ghostly companion through the tried and true method of a late night movie marathon.

* * *

Author'sNotes: 

Well, I'm not certain how ghosts really function, but who cares, this one is going to work this way.

It was a vague idea that bubbled up in my head while watching an episode of 'Here is Greenwood' sometime.


	6. Poopy meet Fan

**Part the Sixthe**

Or

Poopy, Meet Fan

A Huge disclaimer.

* * *

I woke early the next morning, and promptly awarded myself some additional sleep. Good boy Harry. 

I woke again around nine and decided that enough was enough. I dropped silently to the floor and gently shook Luna.

"Wesssrrry?" she asked, and opened her eyes a bit.

"I'm just going to take a real shower, ok?"

She yawned and stretched a bit.

"Ok, Harry. Let me know when you're done so I can have one."

And because tossled and sleepy Luna is cute, I press a kiss on the top of her head, and wander out and upstairs, sparing a glance for the ghost sleeping near the ceiling where I was hanging in the corner of the room.

She'd been almost deliriously happy last night. Really, it was more than a little bit disturbing. For someone to get so much pure enjoyment out of a movie marathon spoke of long term deprivation and unhappiness. Really, it was imperative for both of us to give her a thorough education in happiness. Our duty, in fact.

Well, not that I really had that much background in excessive happiness, but I was willing to give it a shot.

Speaking of happiness, a nice hot shower was going to give me a good start in that direction.

It was, of course, halfway through that shower when the wards started to go off, indicating a trespasser walking towards the house.

Cursing, I quickly washed the soap off, and leapt out of the shower, ready to dress and kick ass.

Amy chose that moment to float up through the floor.

"Harry, Luna says that…" she faced me, and her eyes widened.

"Hwa… grrrkk."

It seems that ghosts do disappear when they faint.

Heh. Mr. Potter, you are a sexy, sexy beast.

With a swagger in my step, and additional clothing, I pounded down the stairs and tossed open the front door to look outside.

My tactical analysis was interrupted by a sudden explosion of body parts inside the house, as what looked like a whole group of Death Eaters made an assault through Luna's Splice-Of-Doom wards.

Incredible. It looked like a total horror show. Screams echoed through the house and chunks of flesh jerked and wiggled all over the floor and furniture.

Sweet.

After I satisfied myself that there weren't any connected wands, hands, and eyes in the room behind me, I turned back to look out the door.

Death eaters, check.

Werewolves, check.

Two giants, check.

Wow, well they certainly weren't pulling many punches when they pulled this lot together. Obviously my reputation was still intact.

I stepped out of the door, whistling like I was out for a morning stroll, and headed out to meet them.

Sadly for them, Luna's reputation in the world in general was obviously that of "some mad bitch who publishes some rag newspaper."

The roar from behind me of an assault rifle firing on full automatic convinced me that her reputation should have been, at the very least, "some mad bitch who publishes a rag newspaper and who owns an AK-47 and isn't afraid of using it."

As she switched in the second magazine and emptied it into the group as well, I took a moment out from watching death eaters struggle to erect wards against the bullets, and peered back at her.

She stood amidst the scatter of shell casings, the rifle up at her shoulder, and cordite smoke spilling out of the barrel. She blew a stray lock of hair out of her face.

In case I hadn't made it clear before, my new girlfriend, one Luna Lovegood, is the hotness.

She tossed me a wink, dropped the rifle, and scampered off back into the house, pulling her wand out from behind her ear as she went.

The sudden silence was deafening, spoiled only be the cries of death eaters who'd been hit, but not fatally.

One of the giants slowly toppled over with half of its head missing, crushing one more death eater in the process.

Well.

Time for me to fight then, I suppose.

I threw a few reductor curses into the ground in front of them, and watched the dust billow and scatter on their wards as it fell.

Huh. Interesting.

I snap draw my katana and hold it in front of me. Subtle illusions and transformations cause my cloak to billow out, and a faint haze of light gather around my body.

"Vacuum Cutter!" I shout, and swing my katana two handed in front of me, releasing the trigger on the illusion spell, shield folder, and cutter spells I'd cast while obscured by the dust from the reductors.

The wave of light expands in a wedge.

Their shields fold inwards along a line as the ward origami spell takes hold. The illusion ends in a flash of light that blinds them, and the cutter spell slices the first rank of death eaters in half.

I cast a complex illusion, and step three paces to the side while the death eaters are still blinded by the flash of light, and the spray of blood from their comrades.

They panic, and start to hurl Ava Kedavras towards me.

Sadly, my illusion isn't actually me, which allows me to construct the unsettling image of me actually parrying the AK spells with my katana.

Of course, I'm not. I'm standing five feet of to the side, cloaked and invisible. But really, they don't need to know that.

They choose this time to panic a bit.

Some at the back start to retreat, as those at the front scramble to try and put something between them and me, whether that's new warding, a death eater, or a wall.

For those at the back, their flight is a short one. They scurry in a group through an anchored airblade ward, which neatly cuts off their feet.

Oh dear. This is going to take quite some cleaning up, isn't it?

You might think that the sight of five or six individuals screaming on the ground, dying of shock and bloodloss would cause some sort of twinge, right?

I'm the hero, right?

I grin, and throw the concussion grenade towards the closest death eaters shortly after the spoon on it pops up.

It distracts them with dazing force as the molten lava that had been heating beneath their feet since they tripped the first wards suddenly surges out of the ground, charring and burning.

At the same time, I merge back with my illusion. No need to give that particular trick away.

The remaining giant topples with a confused look on its face as it's slowly burnt to a cinder starting at it's feet.

Sad flickers of magic spill out of the decimated group as some of those who are left attempt to apparate or portkey out, only to be caught by their own wards erected to keep Luna and I from fleeing.

I toss a quick tracing spell, and see that there are three mages left with shields up.

Not bad.

"Harry, look out on your sides!"

Amy says it quietly into my ear. It's a bit of a shock, since she's barely visible and I hadn't noticed her.

I had noticed the werewolves slinking towards me, of course, but I didn't want to crush her little contribution to the fight. A bit of feeling useful and valued might do the world of good for her.

Provided I don't have to shred her eternal spirit if she's actually a spy.

"Got them, thanks Ames. Now you go ahead inside, ok? I don't know for sure what will happen if you're hit by an AK, and I don't want to experiment with you, that's for sure."

I give her a smile. I expect light glints off my teeth. It's that sort of smile.

By the faint red glow in the air, I know that I've managed to make her blush again.

Direct hit, Mr. Potter.

I crouch down, and an AK from one of the remaining mages sizzles past just over my head. A reductor curse in the ground is probably supposed to distract me more from the two weres that are even now charging towards me from both sides, slavering jaws open.

They leap.

I channel a transmutation spell through my hand into the earth at my feet, and two rocky spears shoot out of the earth into the path of the weres.

It'll be painful for them, but not fatal.

Which is why, just before they impact on them, I transmute them into silver.

Whoops.

Their dying howls of agony wash over me as they twitch and struggle, impaled on metal that sears through their corrupted flesh.

I stand up, decapitate one of the weres with a swing of my katana, and sheath it again. Wouldn't want to do that with it unblooded.

I draw the wakazishi that is it's twin into a reverse grip in my right hand, and pull my wand left handed.

Three wizards remain, that's all.

Well four, if you count that chap over on the hillside watching through binoculars. Take a good look. Enjoy the spectacle I'm putting on for you here.

Scurry back to your boss and let him know just what I've done.

And then I'm engaged in a magical dual, and don't have time to focus on that lone figure anymore.

I figure that the three left are pretty useful. They've managed to ward themselves against bullets, levitate up from the lava, and avoid being stunned by the concussion grenade.

They show it with their attacks, trying to combine their assaults to overwhelm me.

They aren't good enough or familiar enough with each other to do that, but I remain on the defensive, analyzing and cataloguing their spells. It's nice to know what death eaters are being trained in these days. It keeps me current.

A sharp crack echoes out, and one of them crumples to the ground.

The fact that Luna just took one of them in the head with an enchanted ward piercer bullet fills me with….

Well, she's being unexpectedly vicious.

Luckily for the sake of our relationship, for me girl gun unexpected sniping ability turn on.

However, I'm really, really hoping that she isn't pushing herself too far. I don't need to deal with psychological trauma in someone else at the moment.

And she's been pretty good so far. I wouldn't want her to get ed up like me.

The two left raise redundant wards to defend themselves. Another bullet sparks on one set, but drops to the ground.

No more shots means that she's seen the redundant shielding and isn't going to waste expensive bullets on them. But the Death Eaters still have to maintain them, which sucks down their energy.

Vicious and thrifty too.

Two big reductors into the ground in front of them send gravel shooting high into the air.

A barrage of minor cutting, stinging, and binding spells keep them busy as I switch over to attacking.

Hexes flash and whine on the shields in front of them, especially in front of their heads.

And then the 50 ton boulders transmuted from falling gravel slam into their shields from above.

Unable to take the pressure, the shields of the one on the right buckle and crack. He tries to dodge out of the way to the side, but it just crushes his lower body, pinning him to the ground.

He's done for.

The death eater that's left is unexpectedly good for the first wave of attackers. He's probably the one in charge of this whole thing. Maybe if I gave him time, he'd apparate out of here, or use a portkey. I'm fairly sure they've taken down their wards by now.

So I keep him busy.

His spells take a turn for the slightly more exotic. He's probably getting a bit desperate by now, hoping that blasts of fire and the like might get me away from him for long enough so he can stop shielding and get out.

Not going to happen.

He stumbles, tired from channeling the magic it took into a huge conflagration spell.

Caught in the middle of it, but cozily shielded against fire, I use a quick legimency attack. A vivid mental image of fluffy bunny rabbits overwhelms him. Situational irony at work, baby.

In a magically powered rush, I cover the distance between us in an instant, and shatter his wards with a ritual disruption spell that's taken me the last 20 seconds to prepare.

And I cut off his hands.

A quick flash of fire cauterizes the stumps, a medical spell stabilizes him so he won't die of shock, and a portkey crammed into his mouth rips him away into an auror holding cell back at the ministry.

A muffled crack from the hill tells me that the scout has seen all they need to see, and has fled.

Smart of him.

Hopefully he won't notice the tracer spell until later.

Ok, maybe not so smart.

I sigh, and look around with a grimace. The reek of burnt flesh fills the air, and huge swaths of grass are blackened and dead.

The dead and the dying are everywhere.

I suppose it's time for me to clean some of this up. Nobody needs to see this sort of thing. Nobody should ever have to see this sort of thing.

From long experience, I created an adaptation of the scourgify spell that works on blood and the like. You have to be a bit careful because it would probably peel your skin off if you cast it on yourself, but nothing beats it for mopping up those pesky pools of blood on the ground.

I sigh. It takes a considerable amount of time to actually do the research and create a new spell. I suspect the fact that I've put so much effort into this spell says something telling about my life.

The next spell I make will cause pretty flowers to bloom up from the ground.

And maybe I can make a variant that creates flowers with deadly pollen…

Dammit! It's just that sort of thing that worries me sometimes. Sometimes, Potter, a flower is just a flower, not a hidden instrument of death.

Plus, if I can grow flowers, I can give them to Luna all the time.

Whoops! Down boy. That sort of thought is worrying in a whole different way.

I come across one Death Eater who's still alive. My wand twitches through the first motions of a simple cutter, but I manage to stop myself. I look down at him, rolling on the ground moaning. It seems that he put his amputated feet in stasis, and avoided dieing of shock. I toss a portkey at him, and off he goes to a holding cell at the ministry.

Well, I suppose the whole 'return to heroism' thing has to start somewhere.

Maybe I could have stunned some of these punks.

Luckily, molten magma tends to get rid of the corpses it creates, so clean up isn't so bad. I just hope Luna wanted a rock garden in her front yard, that's all.

Anyway, I head back into the house to find Luna and see how she's doing.

Bits of Death Eater moan and scream piteously all over the floor. I'd forgotten about them. I quickly shovel all the parts down into the holding cell in the basement and fill up the dishes again.

Then I head upstairs to find Luna and Amy.

In a curious reversal of last night, Amy is standing looking on helplessly as Luna kneels on the floor, sobbing. I gently take the hunting rifle out of her hands, put it on the bed, and pull her into my arms.

Her sobs get louder.

Poor thing. I suppose that she'd seen everything that had gone on out there, something I wouldn't have wished on my worst enemy.

Of course, it was happening TO my worst enemy, so they wouldn't be seeing it, really, other than first hand.

Eventually her sobs trail off into hiccups. She pulls back a bit from me, and looks up at me, her eyes red and watery.

"Oh Harry," she says, "Love, it's terrible."

"I didn't want you to have to see that, Luna. It's just the sort of thing I get involved in."

"Mmm, but… Harry… all these years," she says. "You've been doing that, and haven't had anyone to hold you and support you."

"Um?" I say.

"That's what's terrible, Harry. I suppose the bloody bits are sort of bad, but… come here, love," she says, and pulls me close to her, cradling me against her.

She smooths my hair down a bit, and whispers to me.

"There there, Harry. Even if I'm not your girlfriend, I won't let you face that sort of thing alone anymore. I promise."

She hums something under her breath, and just holds me.

I think I come within spitting distance of breaking down and bawling like a big baby. Once again, she's totally defied my expectations. Anyone normal would have been worried about themselves. This weird girl of mine was still worried about me.

What I say is normal is highly fucking over-rated.

I sit up and crush her against me in a fierce hug.

"You're a wonderful girl, Luna Lovegood," I say to her. "Now let's get some breakfast."

We start to wander downstairs.

"And you too Ames. Well done."

She flushes with happiness as she floats behind us.

"Thank you, Mr. … Harry," she says, a bit breathlessly. I suppose she thinks that standing with me on the field of battle gives her the option to use my first name. Of course, she could have used it before with no problems at all, but still she's really earned it now.

"Just be really careful, huh?" I warn her. "I want to make sure that something like an AK won't effect you, even though you're a ghost. I'm not going to let you get hurt anymore than you already have," I tell her.

"Oh… oh, thank you Harry. Thank you!"

She's tearing up. Ah well. So the ghost haunting me is a big softie. No worries, I guess.

"So, Luna," I say, "are you going to tell us where you learned to shoot like that?"

"Oh, sure," she says, munching on some celery. "Of course, my father and I traveled all over the world looking for various animals, and there's quite a few places where being a young woman, attractive or not, carries it's own risks. Of course usually I disguised myself as a boy, just for the sake of prudence, but at the same time there's a lot of people for whom a small pointy stick isn't quite as effective a deterrent as an assault rifle."

I nod gravely. Very true, that.

"And then of course, since I was carrying, I had to learn how to use it. But the end reason was really those bloody crumple horned snorkaks."

"Really? But you wanted to find them so badly."

"Well yes, we did, but Merlin, the whole reason their horn is crumpled is that they keep on smashing into things with it. Once you find them, you end up with whole herds of the ornery bastards charging at you with their horns down."

"I had no idea."

"Neither did Dad, actually, but after the first Landrover got trashed we didn't have much of a choice. Telephoto lenses to take pictures, and rifles if they get mad."

"Luna, you're full of surprises, you know?"

"I try to be," she says with a slightly impish smile.

"Well so far they've all been good ones, so keep it up." And I answer her smile with one of my own.

Somehow that precipitates a round of snogging quite noteworthy for… well, lots of things really.

I even manage to wink at Amy while she hovers watching us.

Damn, that girl can blush.

Of course, just as things have the potential to become truly interesting, Luna's doorbell rings.

Someday, I will seriously hunt down Mr. Muphy and kill him dead. Then I'll burn his smart ass laws.

But this time, seeing Luna stamp her foot in frustration almost makes it worthwhile.

* * *

Author's Notes 

Sorry for the delay.

You'll note that I upped the rating. I figured that a higher one was now required, really.

I remember one of the reviews was expecting more blood. Here it is, you just had to be patient, that's all. For everyone else, I hope this isn't too much of a shock. I wanted to portray Harry as an efficient killing machine, which is what he's been forced to become. I also hope nobody finds Luna's reaction too off. She might think about what she did next chapter, but for now, she's just thinking about him.

Also, I'll give three guesses as to who is at the door.

A final note... if anyone out there wishes to complain about my speeling, please offer to beta for me instead. Nagging might get chapters out faster that way anyway.


	7. Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy

**Potter Yojimbo Chapter 7 - Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy**

I Disclaim. Everything. Everywhere.

Or else.

* * *

When last we were interrupted, Luna and I were about to explore new dimensions in our relationship. Possibly horizontal ones.

This boded ill for whatever interrupted us, even if, on the whole, it was probably a good thing; at least in the considered opinion of the senatorial chamber-of-sober-second-thought part of my brain. Which maintained that a distracted bodyguard isn't a good body guard, and that it would be best to slow things down with Luna lest our relationship become about the physical, rather than encompassing the physical.

Other parts of my mind were making outraged barbaric yolps demanding smiting of doorbells and/or visitors with large swords, large guns or both and then indefinite continuation and extension of previous activities.

Oh, the mind is overlaid with a thin veneer of civilization indeed!

The more irritating part was that they only people who could have got close enough to ring the doorbell without triggering any of the other wards outside belonged to a small and quite select group of people.

And I didn't want to talk to any of them right now.

But given the brand spanking new and still steaming hot magma rock garden out front, I can't really choose not to open the door, as it will cause more problems than it will solve.

So I give Lu a quick smile and shrug, and we wander off to be social.

Social in this context means I check outside and then jerk the door open with wand drawn.

I surprise Ginny and Ron in the midst of examining the shell casings and Luna's discarded AK-47 on the doorstep.

Super-duper!

I resolve to give Mr. Murphy one or two sharp kicks somewhere soft and Mister-y, and **then** burn his laws. Smartass.

I'd forgotten that they lived close enough that they would have felt the magical discharge from the fight.

Ron stares at me like an unexpected brussel sprout in the middle of his steak and kidney pie.

Ginny looked at me with surprise, adoration, embarrassment, and anger, in that order, in the space of about 1 second. The anger, of course, is a direct and continuing result of the adoration.

Let me explain in a quick digression.

We leave the four (or five) of us in an amusing comedy tableau and journey back in time to when doo doo was hitting the fan on an almost industrial scale on a daily basis.

I was still young and naïve when I dumped Gin to go off and do the suicidal "I shall confront the evil dark lord" thing. Blah, blah, Griffindor, blah blah, noble suffering and so forth.

Through several years of limited scale, no holds barred, magical conflict that tempered me into the badass, superficially amoral creature of incredible smexy that I am today, Gin basically stayed at home. Gasping and no doubt bursting into tears at appropriate times, waiting for me to get things done and then return to her in order that we might embrace in front of the setting sun, while the cameras zoom out and pan up to the sky.

"The evening is getting dark, we should return home, my love," says she in a slightly suggestive but in no way prurient tone.

"There is always light where you are, dear heart," says I, in an improbable baritone voice as the breeze whips my untamed hair around and ruffles my inexplicably unbuttoned shirt.

Yeah.

Didn't happen.

Instead, I made a spectacle of myself by conspiring with the aid of Draco Malfoy to shag everyone in the magical world that we wanted to. Luckily this didn't involve too many of our former classmates, because that would have created ongoing humiliation. I think it's because dating within the tribe… it could have been serious, and at the time that was the last thing we were looking for.

For a while, Gin altered her narrative. I was out being 'naughty' but I would inevitably return to her once I'd got it out of my system, and then she would 'tame' the 'bad boy' and we would live happily ever after.

Didn't happen.

So one Christmas at the burrow I was 'confronted' in a planned 'intervention' on the part of elements of the Weasley clan.

I was unnecessarily clear, and probably graphic about where the intervention could go and get shoved.

Jelly molds came into violent use.

I left, and didn't go back.

Since then, Ginny has garbed herself in an attitude of upper-middle class priggishness and become a priggish society columnist in a priggish paper.

Apparently she has a wide following in the magical world.

Not as wide as mine, of course.

Hello, I have a freaking Action Figure?

Anyway, sometimes I feel a bit sorry for it all, but it's a tiny little bit of sorry that gets smaller all the time.

I do admit that Draco and I should NEVER have hidden a couple of those inflatable dolls of us in her office closet where they'd fall out and be seen by everyone. You know, the ones for adults?

That was disrespectful.

I also poked myself in the eye with my wand I was laughing so hard and it smarted for days.

Moving on, Ron is also there on the doorstep.

During our little war he used his tactical genius to coordinate defense against the Death Eaters. Free to strike wherever they wanted on a moment's notice, there's probably thousands of people alive now because of his strategies, and Hermy's research.

So he got his fame and fortune, and rightly so.

But for the most part, he stayed off the front line.

Of course once in a while the Death Eaters got through, and people died. But it was easy to keep things in boxes; they were bad, we were good. Moral system solid and unchallenged.

I went and killed people and saw people killed, and got screwed up.

Not to retroactively self-angst or anything like that, but let me tell you that while muggle humans are creatively horrible to each other all the time, creatively horrible in the hands of a wizard or witch… well it's best not to think about it too much really.

So years later when Hermy had done her research, and figured out why I was messed up, and after I'd toned down the really, horribly offensive behaviour, and after she'd given me a patented almost-but-not-quite-bone-breaking-hug, we chatted.

She'd gone out with Ron for a while, but he hadn't "bloomed" in the way she'd hoped, or at least that's what she said. So she stopped.

I'm less polite, so I'll say that he's sexist, and a bigot and anti-intellectual, and thus not a 100% awesome-tastic match for Hermy.

Still a good sort, but only if you want to talk quiddich and drink butterbeer and fire whiskey.

Basically the same as he was in school.

Except sort of swelled.

God.

I think I've just depressed myself in the course of my inner expository monologue, which is not cool.

Anyway!

"What the bloody hell is going on here," shrieks Ginny, "and what is that pervert doing here?"

I look at Luna, and she looks at me.

"Harry! What is Harry doing here?" she asks again.

"Ohhh… well, sorry he hasn't done anything perverse yet. At least… well, no, not that. And that certainly wouldn't count," says Luna, tapping her chin while she thinks. "Anyway, wouldn't we have significant latitude in establishing boundaries for perversity given that he's my boyfriend?"

"Boyfriend?" gaped Ginny.

Ron took a moment off from gasping for breath to also gape at us.

"Yes," said Luna, "I asked him out, and he said yes. So really, it wouldn't be perverse even if we did something involving…"

"Just about anything at all," I quickly cut her off before Ron's eyes actually drop out of their sockets, "in the privacy of Luna's house."

"Yes, anything at all. Like Harry says," confirms Luna.

My new and more sensitive Luna radar suggests to me that she was gaily looking forward to making up something outrageous, precisely because she wants to see if she can make their brains shut down.

"Oh Luna," says Ginny, calming down with a deep breath, "Harry is just telling you that so he can get in your pants, you know that, don't you? You shouldn't trust him! You know he doesn't go out with girls like you."

"Ginny, I don't think Harry will fit in my pants, but he's welcome to try them if he wants. He wouldn't need to be my boyfriend for that."

"Luna! I mean, you know?" Ginny makes a complicated gesture that suggests two jellyfish with their tentacles tied together trying to dance a rapid two-step.

"Ohhhh, fucking. Well, he can do that too if he likes. Have you seen his ass, Ginny? It's fabulous. I could bounce a galleon off it."

Ginny and Ron are driven back into catatonia, and I cough. Whatever happened to nervous Luna from day 1?

I look at her faintly pink cheek, and realise that she's still there, but she's fighting back against being dismissed as not my sort of girl.

"Maybe I haven't gone out with girls like Luna before because there is only one Luna, and it took her a while to figure out how to abduct me," I suggest. "At the moment though, I'm experiencing Stockholm Syndrome on a scale previously unprecedented in world history."

"What?" ask Ron, thoroughly confused.

"You're both loony," says Ginny, her voice rising in volume, "Make sense, and don't use muggle language we won't understand."

Luna laces her fingers together with mine and gives a squeeze. She gets it.

I pull her over in front of me, wrap my arms around her stomach, and peer at them around her head. She's a bit too tall to put my chin on top of her head.

She lets out a breath, and gives a tiny shiver.

Brave girl.

"Anyway, I think that Harry and Luna are so special together," says Amy, floating out from behind us.

There are several seconds of silence.

"I think you broke them, Ames," I suggest.

"Wha… what… have you enslaved some succubus spirit to slake your passions on, you monster?" shrieks Ginny.

…

…

It takes several minutes for us to stop laughing.

"Oh Merlin," says Luna, wiping her eyes, "that was brilliant."

"Oooohhhh… my ectoplasm hurts," Amy complains, holding her stomach.

"Gin, well, aren't succubi a little more, you know, ooommmph?" asks Ron, making the internationally recognised sign for "I wish to buy two watermelons".

"Will you just shut up, Ron," says Gin, still actively fuming.

"Anyway, we've missed the important point here," I state, authoritatively. Or at least as authoritatively as I can with Luna's hair tickling my nose.

"Yes, what the hell was that magic going on here? We could feel it all the way from the burrow," says Ginny, "We rushed here to help, and we find you cavorting with…"

I interrupt by shaking my head and holding up a hand.

"No, not that," I say, while pulling away from Luna, and digging in my pocket for my wallet. "Clearly, there's some lingering disbelief here that needs to be dispelled by a practical demonstration."

I pull out a galleon, hand it to Luna, and stick my butt out.

"Go on," I say, "bounce me."

"Oh! Well, maybe we should use multiple trials, to establish a baseline?" Luna says, brightly, "I'll go and get a measuring tape and a clipboard."

If we were in a cartoon, there would be steam coming out of Ginny's ears.

"Stop it! Stop your offensive idiocy, Harry, and just shut up. Luna, now tell me what is going on, and no beating around the bush, or any of those stupid animals."

"Oh poo," says Luna, with a pout.

"Don't worry, we can do the testing later," I murmur, theatrically _sotto voce_, and waggle my eyebrows broadly.

Luna nudges me back, and winks. "Say no more, Harry Potter, say no more!"

"Anyway," says Luna, "It wasn't a big deal. Just some Death Eaters attacking. You know, evil wizards, werewolves, giants and such."

"Bloody hell, Harry!"

I wince, and sigh. Really, Ron? Really?

Just then, and things start to calm down a little bit, we're interrupted by a scream from the basement. Something about bats, if I heard correctly.

Ginny's eyes widen, and she pushes past us towards the back of the house where she knows the stairs are, with Ron following.

Luna nudges me.

"Bloody hell, Harry!"

"Bloody hell, Luna," I reply, and grab her hand again.

We're interrupted by Ginny's scream, coming from the basement.

And Ron's scream, coming from the basement.

Standing at the top of the stairs and looking down, I can see, objectively, that they have a point.

A carpet of body parts wriggled and squirmed on the floor like an H.R. Giger set design brought to life. Dismembered faces and mouths screamed in terror.

About bats.

Ginny looked up at us, her face so pale that the freckles showed right though the foundation makeup.

"Harry, I don't know what the hell you're doing, and I don't care," she said. "I'm going to go home, and then I'm going to take the floo to the Ministry of Magic. I'm going to lodge a formal complaint, and you're going to get arrested. You're sick. Now get out of my way."

"Gin, maybe there's a reason for…" Ron trailed off, as his mind obviously isn't capable of supplying a good reason for what's on the floor.

"If you want to go without listening, Ginerva, then do watch out for the wards," Luna said, with an airy smile. "Maybe you could walk to the edge of the property before you apparate? You'll need plenty of power, and skill to apparate safely through them."

"Power? Skill? Let me past," Ginny snarled, pushing me roughly out of her way, and with a snort, walking straight through Amy.

Then she stopped, concentrated, and…

*Pop*

"Ronald, you may wish to return home now, and rescue Ginerva," said Luna with a sigh.

"Rescue her?"

"Well, I expect she's spilched in bits all over your house, since that's what the wards seem to do."

"Spilched? Ohhh… is that what happened to…"

"Yup," I say.

"And now Ginny is…"

"Yup," I say.

"She's going to do her nut," said Ron, going a bit pale.

"Yup," I say. This time with a smile.

"Harry, that's my little sister you're smiling about being in bits now," he says, with a bit of a growl, stomping towards the door.

At the door he sighed, and turned back.

"Look, Harry, if you need any help with those Death Eaters," he says, clasping my hand.

"I promise I'll give you a call if I need your help," shifting my grip to transform the hand shake into one of those awkward man hug things.

He leaves, reassured by the sincerity of my man hug.

We wave.

"Don't worry," I say, turning to Luna, "won't be calling him up. You're worth four of him in a fight, and we don't have the supplies laid in to feed four Ron's for the rest of the week."

"Harry!" says Luna, trying for disapproval, but the effect is ruined by her snortle of amusement.

"Maybe if the giants challenge us to an eating contest," I consider, and Luna laughs.

I use a warming charm on our interrupted breakfast, and we sit down to eat.

After several minutes of munching, Luna sighs.

"I do feel a bit bad about taunting her into apparating through the wards," she says. "That wasn't particularly nice."

"Nicer than the things that I was considering," I say with a grin. "She can say what she likes about me, but you're off limits."

"Harry, we're both off limits, ok? Next time I'll just ask her how her inflatable 'Magic Wand' Harry is doing. That will shut her up."

I snort uncontrollably, and look away so that I don't have to meet her eyes.

"Harry," exclaims Luna, "that wasn't you that put that… wait, what am I saying, of course that was you."

"And Draco," I say, "it was mostly Draco's fault, really. Well, probably. If you squint."

She shakes her head with a bit of a smile.

"Of course," she adds, "that won't stop me from asking her about it."

"She was a bit of a… a… mad cow, wasn't she," says Amy, with a bit of blush.

Luna and I look at each other.

"Bloody hell," I say with a laugh.

"Gin isn't going to cause any problems, is she?" Luna asks, contemplatively as she has some bacon.

"Well, she'll have to pull herself together first," I say with a grin, "and then she'll have to find someone who'll actually listen to her ranting in the auror offices. We'll be done here before anyone even files any paperwork."

Luna, still in obvious pain from my joke gets up to do the dishes.

I help.

By 10:00am we're snuggling on the couch together, ready to start phase 2 of our movie marathon, Amy hovering over us.

Life, at this moment, is pretty good.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

I'm guilty of slight misuse of the 'Stockholm syndrome' tag… but it sounded good, so I'm going with it.

This is actually the second time I've written this chapter… I had it basically finished, but then the memory stick disappeared. I think it may have been better the first time, or at least probably more consistent in tone with the other chapters of the story?

Sorry about the long delay… not due to the absence of interest, but due to the presence of 2 small children who have had a disruptive effect on life similar to a 'shock and awe' military campaign.


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